jig: 2 POPULAR SCILERCE MONTELY.
DECEMBER, 1909
THE PLANET VENUS!
By Dr. PERCIVAL LOWELL
FLAGSTAFF, ARIZ,
HE special object of the observatory which I have the honor to represent is the study of planets of our solar system, beginning with their present state and passing thence to their evolutionary his- tory. So extended to-day is the astronomic field that to do good work one must specialize his endeavor, restricting himself to one particular branch of it and incidentally refraining, we may add, from discussing that of which he has not expert knowledge. Now research on the planets constitutes one such division, making as it were an entity in itself. For diverse as the planets are to-day, they are all the result of one particular evolutionary process and knowledge of each member throws light upon the development, past or present, of the others.
It is popularly imagined that our gaze is concentrated on Mars, to the exclusion of much else, and that we are particularly concerned with its habitability. That this is a popular fallacy I shall show you to- night. For we shall contemplate together another planet in the light that study of the past thirteen years at the Lowell Observatory casts upon it, and we shall see not only that such a study has indicated it not to be habitable, but that the question of habitability has not in the least affected our research. In short, to us habitation by organic life or non-habitation is merely an incident in the study of a planet’s his- tory, which we view with as strict scientific impartiality as we do the presence or absence of water-vapor in its air. We are concerned solely with the facts, a romantic enough revelation in themselves.
Venus, I need not remind you, is the planet which stands orbitally next inside the earth in the solar family. To us she is by far the most brilliant star in the firmament, excelling Sirius some sixteenfold and
* An evening lecture at the vicennial of Clark University.
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paling Jupiter when seen near him by almost the like amount. Her incomparable splendor is partly the result of propinquity; nearness to ourselves and nearness to the sun. Relatively so close is she to both bodies that to show she does not need the abetting background of the night, but without waiting for the sun’s withdrawal may nearly always be seen in the daytime in clear air if one knows where in the sky to look. Situate about seven tenths of our own distance from our common giver of light and ‘heat, she gets about double the amount of solar radiation that falls to our lot, so that her surface is proportionately brilliantly illuminated. Being also relatively near us, she displays a correspond- ingly large disk.
Nevertheless, until recently astronomic inquiry regarding her has proved singularly baffling. The beauty of her face was equaled only by the blankness of her expression. Hers proved one of those counte- nances that dazzle on a first glance, to tell you nothing on a second. From the time when Galileo first saw her phases, little was learned of her for two centuries and a half, and even the little she seemed to show proved misleading. The few traits thought to be discerned there were so faint and fugitive that, while some observers deemed them substan- tial, others ascribed them in whole or part to cloud. A cloud-en- shrouded planet Venus in consequence was considered to be; a covering not so much for her own sins of commission as for the sins of omission of observers to see.
It was not until Schiaparelli attacked the subject that any real light was shed on her who reflected so much. Through a new departure, by choosing daylight for his observation time, that most eminent ob- server first solved one riddle she had read astronomers so long, the length of her day. Hitherto she had been scanned chiefly for a few moments at twilight and the recurrent aspect her disk presented on successive days had been for much in imputing to her a rotation not differing substantially from the earth’s in length. Schiaparelli’s method allowed of repeated scanning during several hours at a stretch and in this manner he learned that the periodic punctuality of the same features night after night was not because they managed so nearly to keep pace with our own, but because they failed to move at all in the meantime. In other words, her day must be immensely long. He then critically examined the older observations and found that they could all be thus explained. Six years later he repeated his observations and with the like result.
In 1896 the subject was taken up at Flagstaff. Very soon it became evident that markings existed on the disk, most noticeable as fingerlike streaks pointing in from the terminator, faint but unmistakable from the positional identity of their successive presentation. A projection near the south cusp was also clearly discernible, as well as two others, one in mid-terminator, one near the northern cusp. Other dark mark-
THE PLANET VENUS 523 ings also came out, developing into a sort of collar round the south- ern pole. Spots, too, small, not large, stood blotched upon the disk. In this investigation not only was care taken to guard against illusion, but no regard at the time was paid to any previous observations.
The configurations thus disclosed proved permanent in place. By watching them assiduously it was possible to note that no change in position occurred in them upon the face the planet showed, first through an interval of five hours, then through one of days, then of weeks. It thus became evident that they bore always the same relation to the illuminated portion of the disk. ‘This illuminated part, then, never changed. In other words, the planet turned always the same face to the sun. The fact lay beyond a doubt, though of course not beyond a doubter. The fundamental importance of this primary fact upon the world of Venus we shall note as we proceed.
In character these markings were peculiar and distinctive. In ad- dition to some of more ordinary form were a set of spoke-like dark rays which started from the planet’s periphery and ran inwards to a point not very distant from the center. The spokes began well-defined and broad at the edge, dwindling and growing fainter as they proceeded, re- quiring the best of definition for their following to their central hub. They were most noticeable on the edge of the disk which marked the boundary of light and shade, the sunrise line the terminator, as it is called ; less so on that which the sky cut off, called the limb.
From so much of the planet as was then presented earthwards, it was possible to make a map giving the chief features of Venus’s globe. In addition to demonstrating the durational identity of the axial rota- tion and the orbital revolution, the markings showed the planet’s poles to be practically perpendicular to the orbital plane. Thus the central equatorial longitude lay in perpetuity directly under the sun.
The difficulty in seeing these tell-tale marks lies in their faintness. A very good reason for such astronomic concealment on the part of Venus will appear as we go on. In consequence, the contrast must be intensified as much as possible and to secure it a small aperture and low powers are best. It is only in very good air that these helps to definition can be disregarded.
Corroboration of these markings has been obtained at Flagstaff in the years that have since elapsed. In 1903 a bulletin giving drawings of that year was published, showing confirmation, and in 1907 and 1909 other drawings afforded like witness to their actuality. Markings have been seen by almost every member of the staff and independent observations made on identical dates show remarkable agreement.
But the most telling testimony is the concordance in results be- tween different methods of investigation. The first of these we shall mention is the spectroscope.
The spectroscope is primarily an instrument for analyzing light.
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SKETCEES OF THE PLANET VENUS.
The sketches at the top were made on November 1, 1907, by Dr. Lowell (on the left), and on November 2, 1907, by V. M. Slipher (on the right). ‘The sketches in the middle were made by V. M. Slipher and E. C. Slipher, on February 27, 1909. The sketches at the bottom by Dr. Lowell and E. C. Slipher, on April 12, 1909.
Light is due to wave-motion of the ether, and ordinary light consists of a mixture of light of various wave-lengths. By means of a prism or grating these are refracted differently and so sifted into a colored rib- bon or band, the longer waves lying at the red end of the spectrum, as the ribbon is called, the shorter at the violet. Now the spectroscope is such a prism or grating placed between the image and the observer, by means of which a series of colored images of the object are produced. In order that these may not overlap and so confuse one another, the light is allowed to enter the prism only through a narrow slit placed across the telescopic image of the object to°be examined. Thus suc-
THE PLANET VENUS 525 cessive images of what is contained by the slit are presented arranged according to their wave-lengths. In practise the rays of light from the slit enter a small telescope called the collimator, and are there rendered
a Me sf ia oe f ) A. 7 f Re. /| Y fe f* j a \ 4p | My \ j z= ; Lrawn ty Barcwat Lowel: LAO 7 a“ i f | / > d Al \ / Pa jal , oa i ' \ | A \ * | | f . \ % } es \ - Me eas | - PS 5 ye } a 4 et eee se AP 3S Py Fe Fe be 10% j aa Ps / a
Ga. CG? "a 2 DPD tawn by wf bf See: SF 15% SKETCHES OF THE PLANET VENUS. Sketches of different observers showing agreement, made at Tacubaya, Mexico, on February 7, 1897.
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each according to its kind, into a spectral image band which may then be viewed by the eye or caught upon a photographic plate.
One of the interesting applications of the spectroscope lies in its ability to detect motion in the line of sight, or in just the direction in which the eye can not.
It was reasoned by Doppler in 1842 that if an object be coming toward the observer emitting light as it does so, each wave-length of its spectrum should be shortened in proportion to the relative speed of its approach as compared with the speed of light, because each new wave is given out nearer the observer than would otherwise be the case and its wave-length thus seemingly decreased. Reversely it will be length- ened if the object be receding from the observer or he from it. This would change the color of each wave-length and so of the object, were it not that while each hue moves into the place of the next, like the guests at Alice’s tea-party in Wonderland, some red rays pass off the visible spectrum, but new violet rays come up from the infra violet and the spectrum is as complete as before. This unfortunate infecundity of his principle in Doppler’s own hands was remedied in 1848 by Fizeau, who pointed out that the dark lines in the spectra can be used as meas- ures of the shift. In all spectra are gaps where individual wave- lengths are absorbed or omitted and these, the lines in the spectrum, tell the tale.
This principle is applicable not only to a body moving as a whole, but to differing motions of its parts if the body be large enough to show a disk. Now, if a body be rotating, one side of it will be ap- proaching the observer, while the opposite side is receding from him, and if the slit be placed perpendicular to the axis about which the spin takes place, each spectral line will appear not straight across the spec- trum of the object, but skewed, the approaching side being tilted to the violet end, the receding side to the red.
This principle was put in practise by one of the observatory staff, Dr. Slipher, to determine spectrographically the rotation of Venus. By placing the slit parallel to the ecliptic or, more properly, to the orbit of Venus, which is practically the same thing, it would find itself along what we have reason to suppose the equator of the planet and thus by its tilt give evidence of the rotation period capable of measurement. Even a considerable error in the position of the equator would make little difference in the rotational result. In order that there might be no question of illusion or personal bias, photographs instead of eye observations of the spectrum were made.
Dr. Slipher began by considering the take off before he jumped. His sagacity greatly influenced the result. It might seem as if the best time to examine the planet for rotation were when it is farthest from the sun and is best seen. This indeed was the time selected by Belopolsky, who examined Venus spectrographically between the time
THE PLANET VENUS 527
of the inception of the investigation at Flagstaff and its execution and thought he had detected a short rotation for it.
Belopolski made his attempt at elongation in spite of knowing what I shall now explain. For elongation, although the time when the planet is easiest seen, is not that in which it is best examined spectrograph- ically for rotation.
In the case of a body reflecting light, the shift varies from what it is if the body be emitting it, from twice as much in some positions to nothing at all in others. This is because the reflecting surface itself moves to or from the waves. Thus if a planet be on the side of the sun away from the eaith, the rim of it which is approaching the earth ad- vances to meet each new wave and so shortens it by just the amount
THE PLANET VENUS. October 15, 1896. February 12, 1897. March 26, 1897.
of its own advance, thus doubling the shortage which would result if it emitted the waves itself. The receding side in the same manner doubles the recession. If the planet be at right angles to the sun the waves are affected as if they were emitted and we have a single shorten- ing or lengthening, as the case may be. If the planet be between us and the sun, the rim is running from the sun at just the speed it is approaching us and the total effect is nil. N,
Thus in the case of Venus, the evidence of tilt obtained depends entirely on where you take her. Superior conjunction or when she lies beyond the sun is the best time spectrographically and it was this that Dr. Slipher chose. He caught the planet just as she was coming out from‘ behind the sun as evening star. In this he was abetted by the clear and steady air of Flagstaff, which enabled him to get her while she was still not far from the sun himself.
THE PLANET VENUS 529
Another favorable circumstance accrued to his choice of time, the © then diminutive disk she showed. One might suppose at first that this would be a drawback. But the exact reverse is the case. Provided a planet shows any appreciable disk, the smaller that disk the better for spectrographic rotation purposes. For it is the actual velocity that registers itself upon the plate, in the displacement of the several parts of the spectral lines. The greater the diameter, therefore, for a given rotational velocity, the smaller the angular tilt, and reversely, the smaller the diameter the greater the seeming inclinations of the lines. The effect is very striking in the case of Jupiter.
By his choice, then, he began by securing the most favorable con- ditions for disclosing a tilt if any existed, and for thus revealing a parallel, in which condition they fall upon the prism. This spreads them out into the spectrum and another small telescope focuses them, short period rotation if such actually were the fact.
After the spectrum of Venus had been secured on a plate there was taken on either side of it for reference and check the spectrum of iron by means of a spark sent through a tube containing its vapor. As the iron-vapor was stationary with regard to the observer, its lines were necessarily without motional tilt. When a plate had thus been made, the photographic part of the instrument was reversed, the camera be- ing placed above the collimator instead of below it, and the process repeated. This had the effect of reversing the tilt in the resulting spectrogram as compared with the first one. Still other checks were used by Dr. Slipher, such as placing the slit in some cases perpendicular instead of parallel to the supposed equator, which need not be gone into here. They all proved corroborative of his final result.
Fifteen plates with their comparison spectra of iron were thus ob- tained: seven with the camera above, eight with it below. To prevent any bias on his part, Dr. Slipher had the numbers on the plates con- cealed and the plates handed him for measurement without his knowl- edge of which was which. The plates were thus made to tell their own story without prompting or prejudice. The story they told they agreed in within the margin of error accordant with their possible precision. It was: that a rotation of twenty-four hours or anything like it was out of the question. They yielded, indeed, testimony to a negative rotation of three months, which being interpreted meant that so slow a spin as Venus’s was beyond their power to disclose.
For just what their power to precise might be Dr. Slipher was at no less care to determine. Not content with knowing that on a globe the size of Venus the velocity due to spin in twenty-four hours should be spectroscopically measurable, being actually a thousand miles an hour and by the principle explained above giving spectroscopically a shift of over a mile a second, he determined to test the matter directly by the
performance of the spectroscope on Mars. For this purpose seven
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MONTHLY
Sat iin oy - ler 19 Je is
CHART OF THE PLANET VENUS.
plates were made in like manner on that planet. Now Mars is an-ob- ject which by reason of its smaller size is twice as difficult a test for rotation in twenty-four hours as Venus. The plates too did not happen to be so good. Nevertheless, on measurement they yielded a result within a twenty-fourth pait of what we know to be the Mars day. For we know this time to within the hundredth of a second. Now in conse- quence of the smaller quantity to be measured an error of 55 minutes in the case of Mars corresponds to one of 31 minutes on Venus. To this precision, then, the day of Venus would have been determined had it been of twenty-four hours’ duration.
Another test of like character was foithcoming in Dr. Slipher’s spectrograms of the rotation time of Jupiter. Inasmuch as Jupiter’s day at the equator is 9 hours 50.4 minutes long, while Jupiter’s diam- eter is some twelve times that of Venus, the precision possible is here thirty times as great. Thirty-one minutes’ error on Venus would mean about one minute for Jupiter. The spectrograms did even better than this. The known speed of rotation at Jupiter’s equator is 12.63 km.; Dr. Slipher’s spectrograms gave 12.62 km., or within half a minute of
THE PLANET VENUS
RU ne eo
SPECTROGRAM OF JUPITER ABOVE AND OF VENUS BELOW, SHOWING IRON COMPARISON.
the true rotation period. This means that they would have shown Venus’s to within 14 minutes if the conditions were as good. As Jupiter’s spectrograms are easier to measure than Venus’s, while Mars’s are more difficult, we may take 25 minutes for the mean of the two criteria. I need perhaps not tell you that no previous spectrograms of Jupiter for rotation had come up to this precision.
From these two determinations on Jupiter and Mars we may de- termine the utmost period of rotation for Venus which the spectroscope could disclose. This would be the period for which the probable error was just equal to the quantity to be measured. From Mars we have for a 24-hour period on Venus a probable error of 31 minutes. This is one forty-eighth of the quantity measured on the supposition of a day’s period. One of 48 days, therefore, would have its probable error equal to the quantity itself. From Jupiter we get in the same way 96 days. Thus from two to three months would be the limit of leisureliness the spectroscope could be got to note, and it was just this quantity that the investigations on Venus themselves expressed.
The spectroscope, therefore, definitely asserts that the rotation of Venus does not take place in anything approaching twenty-four hours, and by negativing any period up to two or three months long corrobo- rates to the limit of its ability that shown by eye observation, one of 225 days.
The care at Flagstaff with which the possibility of error was sought to be excluded in this investigation of the length of Venus’s day and the concordant precision in the results are worthy of notice. For it is by thus being particular and systematic that the accuracy of the de- terminations made there in other lines besides this has been secured.
Now a certain peculiarity of Venus’s appearance of a totally dif- ferent kind from those so far spoken of, here comes in to corroborate both of the previous determinations: the perfect roundness of her figure. For this very rondure has something to disclose. If Venus rotated in anything like twenty-four hours her disk should be perceptibly flattened at the poles, her figure becoming squat in consequence of her spin. For though as rigid as steel to sudden impulses she would be like putty at
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the hands of long-continued ones. We can calculate about how much that flattening would be. That of the earth is %4g3, that of Mars 149, and both planets rotate in approximately twenty-four hours. That of Venus for a like spin would lie between the two figure, because in mass and density she falls between the earth and Mars. Let us say 447; for it, which would be close to the truth.
Now Venus on occasion offers peculiar opportunity to measure any such flattening if it existed. For at times she passes in transit across the sun’s face. At that moment she presents an absolute absence of phase and in consequence any correction due to asymmetrical illumina- tion is self-eliminated. Furthermore, she then shows the largest of all planetary disks, one of 60 seconds in diameter. A flattening of 47; would amount therefore in her case to 0”.22. Such a quantity could not possibly miss of detection. For that of Mars, which is only half as - much and is not so well displayed, has nevertheless been measured. Yet no divergence from perfect sphericity has ever been found in the globe of Venus, though diameters at all azimuths have been carefully taken when she is seen silhouetted in transit against the sun.
I may have seemed to dwell at unnecessary length upon the time that Venus takes to turn. But there is cause. The rotation time of Venus, the determination, that is, of the planet’s day, is one of the fundamental astronomical acquisitions of recent years. It is not a ques- tion of academic accuracy merely, of a little more or a little less in actual duration, but one which carries in its train a completely new outlook on Venus and sheds a valuable sidelight upon the history of our whole planetary system. For upon it turns our whole knowledge of the planet’s physical condition. More than this, it adds something which must be reckoned with in the framing of any cosmogony.
To this we shall now proceed and if the deductions and the phe- nomena which corroborate them appear almost romantically strange it is in the facts themselves that the romance exists.
In the first place such isochronism gives us a glimpse into the planet’s past. That the day should coincide with the year means that it has been brought to this condition. For that it can always have been so is mechanically highly improbable. On the other hand, there is a cause continually tending to bring about such a result; tidal friction. Under the immense forces at work the planetary masses behave as if they were plastic. In consequence tides of the whole substance are set up in them if they rotate, and these tides act as a brake upon the rota- tion until they finally retard it to coincidence with the orbital revolution.
That Venus now turns the same face in perpetuity to the sun, lets us look down a long vista in her career, and gives us a very instant idea of a phase in a planet’s history: that long slow change by which a day is lengthened to infinity. That Venus should have suffered such action is in keeping with theory, though it could not have been predicted in the absence of facts. For Venus falls exactly on debatable ground, on
THE PLANET VENUS 533
the line as it were. Tidal action depends, for the time necessary to produce a given result, on the square of the radius of the body acted on and as the sixth power of its distance from the exciting cause. In consequence for solar action the nearer planets would show its effect first. Now Mercury already turns the same face always to the sun; the earth, as we know, does not. Venus comes between the two in dis- tance and might therefore a priori do either, depending upon how long the action has been going on. That she agrees with Mercury in con- tinuously staring at the sun thus affords valuable evidence on the gen- eral evolution of the solar system.
Interesting as this information is, it is second to what we learn in consequence about the body itself. To have the same hemisphere ex- posed everlastingly to sunlight while the other is in perpetuity turned away, must cause a state of things of which we can form but faint con- ception from what we know on earth. Baked for xons without let-up and still baking, the sunward face must, if unshielded, be a Tophet surpassing our powers adequately to portray. And unshielded it must be, as we shall presently see. Reversely, the other must be a hyper- borean expanse to which our polar regions are temperate abodes. For upon one whole hemisphere of Venus the sun never shines, never so much as peeps above the star-studded horizon. Night eternal reigns over half of her globe! The thought would appall the most intrepid of our arctic explorers, and prevent at least everybody from going to the pole; or rather what here replaces it “ through the dark continent.”
Deduction from our known premises enables us to go further in sketching the picture of Venus’s globe. Venus we know has an atmos- phere. The effects of it are patent at the times when she passes be- tween, or nearly between, us and the sun. She is then seen haloed by a rim of light due, as Wilson has shown, to reflection chiefly, not to refrac- tion as was formerly supposed, from an atmosphere about her. Now the intense heating to which the center of her sunward side is exposed must necessarily expand the air there, causing it to rise funnel-wise up in a world-wide western cyclone. To fill the space thus depleted cur- rents must set in toward the center from all points of the compass, con- tinuing out to the lighted rim. Their place in turn would be occupied by surface indraughts from the dark side. Meanwhile the heated air would spread like an umbrella round into the cold hemisphere there to descend and replace the outgoing superficial current back to the sunlit face. A regular aerial round of travel is thus started, which is the same forces that began it must keep up. The course is surface-wise from the dark to the illuminated hemisphere; aloft from. the sunlit to the night one.
Now this simple, regular and reliable meteorological service explains a feature of the visual observations which has deterred many timid souls from crediting their reality. One of the most striking features of Venus’s disk are the tongues of shading that make in from all parts of
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the lighted rim toward the center. They are the beginnings of those spoke-like markings the methodical oddity of which makes their actu- ality so difficult of belief. They seem a-thought too peripherally posi- tioned to be other than optically evolved. Their recurrent showing in the same places marks them as facts, however, and as such we must regard them. Now when we consider them in the light of Venus’s meteorology their cause at once suggests itself. And with this index- finger to guide us we perceive that far from being surprising they are just the phenomena we ought to expect. For consider the surface indraught along the bounding rim of constant sun-exposure. With the immense temperature gradient which exists between the day and the night side of Venus, the power of these winds must be enormous. Being essentially surface ones, they must sweep the face of the planet with irresistible force and, what is more, having once found a pathway of preference, must from the general unchangeableness of the conditions continue to follow it perpetually. For the only thing to alter their direction, the libration, is from the circularity of Venus’s orbit negli- gibly small. Sweeping in originally through valleys or mountain passes, the points offering the easiest access, they must eventually have polished the surfaces over which they passed to a differentiation of appearance visible even across millions of miles of intervening space. Essentially surface currents at the rim, they would become less and less so as they neared the center of the lighted side and furthermore would converge as they approached it. They would seem to us to narrow and become at the same time less salient as they advanced. This is just what their spoke-like character shows. Thus the peculiar look of the Venusian markings proves to be in exact keeping with what the conditions de- mand, and by so doing bears testimony that those conditions actually exist.
Not less strange on its face and equally interesting for its disclosure is another phenomenon connected with the planet which also has been deemed incredible—the exceeding brightness of Venus’s disk. Her great luster is, as we saw above, in part attributable to her proximity first to the sun and secondly to us. But this is not the sole cause of it. Though a part of her splendor is due to her position, a part is her own. Her intrinsic brightness, her albedo, as it is called, has been found by Miiller, of Potsdam, who has made the last and most authoritative determination of it, to reach the excessive figure of .92 of absolute reflection. This figure has seemed to many impossible, but we shall see from consideration that it simply reflects the conditions.
The rising currents on the sunward side must from their great heat be capable of holding much water-vapor in suspension. This they would take over with them in large part to the night side and becoming chilled there deposit it as snow. Being cold on their return they would reenter the warm side relatively dry and thus be fitted to act again as water-carriers from that side to the other. This process of depletion
THE PLANET VENUS 535
on the one and accumulation on the opposite hemisphere must end in taking the whole supply, surface or aerial, from the day side to pile it up in perpetual ice upon the night one. . Dry air more or less laden with dust must therefore constitute now the atmospheric covering of the sunward hemisphere. Now this is what gives Venus her excessive luster—an atmosphere devoid of cloud. It is precisely because she is not cloud-covered that her luster is so great. She “ clothes herself with light as with a garment” in consequence of a physical fact of some interest. As becomes the Mother of Loves, this drapery is gauze of the most attenuated character, and yet on that very account is a great heightener of effect. For it is a well-known property of matter that a substance when comminuted reflects much more light than when massed as a solid or an opaque cloud. Now an atmosphere is itself such a comminuted affair and especially is made lucent by the dust of one sort and another which it holds in suspension. This would particu- larly be true of Venus for the reasons we have exposed and thus stands explained her albedo of .92 which were she cloud-covered could not exceed .72, the albedo of cloud. This brightening character of an atmosphere stands corroborated by what we perceive of the other planets. Mercury and the moon, which are airless bodies, have an albedo of only .17; Mars, which has some air but not much, one of .27; while Venus, whose sky is clear, one of .92.
Another phenomenon which has greatly puzzled astronomers stands accounted for by what we have learned latterly of the world of Venus. For years by one observer or another a sort of faint phosphorescent shine has been reported of the unilluminated part of her disk; the ashen light, it has been called. The side of her which should be dark has appeared ghostly lighted up. The phenomenon has seemed the weirder for the difficulty of explaining it. It is like what dimly reveals the old moon in the new moon’s arms. With the moon this is earth-shine; the ° moon-shine the earth herself lends her satellite. But Venus has no neighbor to act as mirror near her, though such be her astronomic symbol. The earth is too far off and the stars inadequate to the occa- sion. But the state of things we have sketched furnishes an explana- tion. If the night side of Venus be a vast stretch of polar ice, here is just the surface to reflect the starlight with something approaching a phosphorescent shine. Nor would this necessarily be dimmed by the dust of ages because of a slow process of glacier rejuvenation constantly in progress, due partly to the winds, partly to a slow sinking of the débris to the bottom.
Such are some of the peculiar phenomena presented by the planet. When we thus reason about them—and even in science reasoning is not so much to be despised as some mechanical souls would have us believe —we see that they lose their oddity, becoming the very pattern and prototype of what we should expect.
Logical deductions from well-established fact has led us to explana-
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tion of what had seemed inexplicable or untrue. Our several results check one another. For, in conclusion, we may note how full of signifi- cance it is that the outcomes of such various investigation should fit into one another to an articulated whole. Their dove-tailing at times is indeed surprising, so diverse the character of the converging lines of research. Thus that the planet’s albedo should have anything to say about the length of its day, should actually come forward in corrobora- tion of the markings’ own forthright showing, would hardly have been supposed. Or that the ashen light of the dark side should find inter- pretation in the same axial rotation through a long chain of concate- nated circumstance was not to be anticipated. Still less would one have divined that the cycle would stand complete and that the very markings which enable us to determine the duration of the Venusian day should have had their peculiar features determined by it.
The foree that such agreement to a common end imparts to the chain of argument needs no comment. It speaks for itself.
The picture of Venus thus presented to our gaze may seem forbid- ding—-one hemisphere a torrid desert, the other deserted ice. Which side strikes us as the worse is matter of personal predilection. But the portrait has its grand features for all that; features which give us a new conception of what exists in the universe and lure our thought afield in space with all the greater insistence for being drawn not from fancy but from fact.
Not less of interest is the way in which our knowledge has been ob- tained ; for it has been acquired by research along very different lines, and then by reasoning upon the results of that research to their neces- sary conclusions. That these conclusions lead to a consistent concep- tion assures us of their truth. Two things are suggested to us by such procedure: first, the pregnancy of considering a subject from many points of view, and secondly, the importance of reasoning upon facts after they have been acquired.
The fact-gatherer has his uses, but they are not those of the highest class. It is not enough to have a thing on our plates, we must know that we have it there and interrogate it for meaning if we would ex- tract from it the knowledge it is capable of yielding and so most truly add to the advance of our day.
In the case before us the result is of special interest because it exemplifies the eventual effects of a force in astronomical mechanics, the importance of which is only beginning to be appreciated: tidal friction. It has brought Venus as a world to the deathly pass we have contem- plated together. Starting merely as a brake upon her rotation, it has ended by destroying all those physical conditions which enable our own world to be what it is. Night and day, summer and winter, heat and cold, are vital vicissitudes unknown now upon our sister orb. There nothing changes while the centuries pass. An eternity of deadly death- lessness is Venus’s statuesque lot.
THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES
THE ARGUMENT FOR ORGANIC EVOLUTION BEFORE “THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES ”
By ProFEssor ARTHUR O. LOVEJOY
THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI
II
i the former part of this historical inquiry, it was shown that four
of the arguments which rapidly made converts to the theory of evolution after 1859 rested upon principles of scientific method and facts of anatomy and physiology which were entirely familiar much more than fifteen years before that date. A similar examination must now be made of four more of the most important “ evidences of evolu- tion.” Here again it will appear that the facts were known at least as early as 1844, and that their evolutionary implications were pointed out by Robert Chambers, Herbert Spencer or other pre-Darwinian writers. It will also appear that the flaws and gaps in the evidence which could be plausibly exhibited by the opponents of the theory dur- ing those fifteen years were, for the most part, not removed by the “ Origin of Species,” nor for a number of years subsequent to its pub- lication. Substantially, whatever force the arguments for the trans- formist conception of the origin of the specific characters of organisms had after 1859, they had before; and whatever weaknesses they had be- fore that memorable year, they still had after it. In presenting proof of this I shall, as before, indicate by direct citations the manner in which the arguments were used by the early Darwinians, and then point out the parallel reasonings in the evolutionists of the earlier period.
3. The Argument from the Sequence of Types in Paleontology.— The nature of this argument is, of course, too familiar to need exposi- tion. The value which Huxley attached to it in 1863 is shown by a passage in his “ Lectures on the Phenomena of Organic Nature”:
If you regard the whole series of stratified rocks . . . constituting the only record we have of a most prodigious lapse of time;—if you observe in these successive strata of rocks successive groups of animals arising and dying out, a constant succession giving you the same kind of impression, as you travel from one group of strata to another as you would have in travelling from one country to another; ... when you look at this wonderful history and ask what it means, it is only a paltering with words if you are offered the reply, “They were so created.” But if, on the other hand, you look on all forms of organized beings as the results of the gradual modification of a primitive type, the facts receive a meaning and you see that these older conditions are the necessary predecessors of the present. Viewed in this light the facts of pale- vol. LXxv.—36.
538 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY ontology receive a meaning—upon any other hypothesis I am unable to see, in the slightest degree, what knowledge or signification we are to draw from them. Again, note ...the singular likeness which obtains between the successive faune and flore, whose remains are preserved in the rocks; you never find any great and enormous difference between them, unless you have reason to believe that there has also been a great lapse of time or a great change of conditions.
Just so did Chambers argue in his “ Explanations,” 1846:
Fifty years ago science possessed no facts regarding the origin of organic creatures upon earth. ... Within that time, by researches in the crust of the
earth, we have obtained a bold outline of the history of the globe... . It is shown on powerful evidence that during this time strata of various thicknesses were deposited in seas; . . . volcanic agency broke up the strata, ete. . . . The
remains and traces of plants and animals found in the succession of strata show that while these operations were going on the earth gradually became the theatre of organic being, simple forms appearing first and more complicated afterwards. ... This is a wonderful revelation to have come upon the men of our time, and one which the philosophers of the age of Newton could never have expected to be vouchsafed. The great fact established by it is that the organic creation, as we now see it, was not placed upon the earth at once:—it observed a progress.” . . . There is also the fact of an ascertained historical progress of plants and animals in the order of their organization. .. . In an arbitrary system we had surely no reason to expect mammals after reptiles; yet in this order they came.”
Thus the general fact of the gradual appearance of higher types in the course of geological time, and the existence of a broad parallelism between antiquity of strata and relative simplicity of the contained organic forms, was by this time thoroughly established and universally familiar. True it is, however, that the evidence from paleontology, when more minutely scrutinized, proved to be by no means so favorable to the development hypothesis. This was so far the case that the ortho- dox geologists were able, with some real plausibility, to turn this weapon against the evolutionists. One of the only two really serious reasons that could be advanced after 1840 for rejecting the hypothesis lay in the observation that the facts of stratigraphic geology, as then known, failed to exhibit, with any consistency, fulness or precision, the se- quences that the hypothesis required. The principal fighting, between the time of the “ Vestiges ” and that of the “ Origin,” took place around this issue; and the battle-ground was well chosen for the conservatives. For the weakest side of the theory of development then was its paleon- tological side. But this continued to be its weakest side in the 1860's; and it is a side not wholly without weak points even at the present day, especially when to the theory of development is added the theory of natural selection.
The chief objections raised by the paleontologists were five in num- ber. There was, first, the general difficulty about the “ missing links ” in the chain of past organisms. Secondly, there was the fact of the * Op. cit., p. 21. “Op. cit., p. 106.
THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 539 apparently sudden appearance of groups of allied, and by no means absolutely primordial, species in the lowest fossiliferous strata then known. Thirdly, there was the sudden disappearance of whole groups of species at the end of certain geological periods, and their sudden replacement in the next period by species different in type from the former, and closely allied to one another. These two points—the second and third—were the especial contribution of the Cuvierian school to the controversy. Out of Cuvier’s doctrine of the abrupt extinction of faunas at the successive “revolutions of the globe,” his disciples had elaborated the theory of the radical and world-wide discontinuity of the faunas and floras of the successive great periods, and had hence inferred the actual necessity of assuming a definite number of special creations of fresh organic worlds en bloc. D’Orbigny knew exactly how many such creations there had been:
The first creation shows itself in the Silurian stage. After its annihilation through some geological cause or other, a second creation took place a consider- able time after, in the Devonian stage; and twenty-seven times in succession distinct creations have come to repeople the whole earth with its plants and animals, after each of the geological disturbances which destroyed everything in living nature. Such is the fact, certain but incomprehensible, which we
confine ourselves to stating, without endeavoring to solve the superhuman mystery which envelops it.”
Fourthly—to continue the enumeration of the paleontological diffi- culties—it was objected that, especially within the limits of single great geological formations, the arrangement of fossils in the strata did not exhibit the required order of progression from lower to higher types, but sometimes even reversed that order. This was Sedgwick’s principal point in his Edinburgh Review article, as it was that of Hugh Miller in his “ Footprints of the Creator,” 1849, the most widely circulated of the replies to the “ Vestiges.” Miller’s argument may be summarized in his own words.?® The latest discoveries in the Silurian and Cambrian series, he declared, do not show the
sort of arrangement demanded by the exigencies of the development hypoth- eses. A true wood at the base of the old red sandstone, or a true Placoid in the limestones of Bala, very considerably beneath the base of the Lower Silurian system, are untoward misplacements for the purposes of the Lamarckian; and who that has watched the progress of discovery for the last twenty years and seen the place of the earliest ichthyolite transferred from the Carboniferous to the Cambrian system, and that of the earliest exogenous lignite from the Lias to the Lower Devonian, will now venture to say that fossil wood may not yet be detected as low in the scale as any vegetable organism whatever, or fossil fish as low as the remains of any animal? But though the response of the earlier geologic systems be thus unfavorable to the development hypothesis, may not
* D’Orbigny, “Cours élémentaire de Paléontologie Stratigraphique,” 1849, II., 251; cited in Depéret, “The Transformations of the Animal World,” 1909, pp. 18-19.
*® Quoted from the American edition, 27th thousand, 1875, pp. 227-8; the edition has a eulogistic preface by Agassiz, 1851.
540 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY
men such as the author of the “Vestiges” urge that the geologic evidence, taken as a whole, and in its bearing upon groups and periods, establishes the general fact that the lower plants and animals preceded the higher, . . . that the fish preceded the reptile, that the reptile preceded the bird, that the bird preceded the mammiferous quadruped and that the mammiferous quadruped and the quadrumand preceded man? Assuredly yes! They may and do urge that geology furnishes evidence of such a succession of existences; and the arrange- ment seems at once a very wonderful and very beautiful one. Of that great and imposing procession of which this world has been the scene, the programme has been admirably marshalled. But the order of the arrangement by no means justifies the inference based upon it by the Lamarckian.
The reason why, according to Miller, it does not, constitutes the fifth objection urged against evolutionism from the side of paleontology ; “superposition,” as Miller put it, “does not mean parental relation,” any more than the presence of gradually accumulated vegetable and animal refuse in a farmer’s ditch means that the creatures whose remains lie at the bottom of the ditch begot those whose remains are found higher up.
The last argument does not call, and never did call, for serious consideration ; it is a begging of the precise question at issue, concealed by a specious but lame analogy. The other four arguments depended, with respect to their logical weight, upon the way in which they were applied. If it were assumed that the burden of offering specific proofs rested upon the transformationist, and that the paleontological evidence was put forward by him as a proof, the objections of the orthodox geol- ogists were perfectly sound: the paleontological evidence was not clear nor complete—though it assuredly pointed toward the probability of the hypothesis. If, again, transformism were regarded as an hypothesis which implied the existence of certain geologic facts, then, also, the objections enumerated were pertinent—with one all-important and extremely obvious qualification: the implied facts in stratigraphic geol- ogy had not been verified—so far as inquiry into a record that will always and necessarily remain fragmentary had then extended. If, lastly, the objections were advanced as a positive disproof of the trans- formation of species, they were entirely incompetent, by reason of the necessity of adding the qualification last mentioned. The record being notoriously incomplete, it was impossible to infer from mere breaches of continuity, and from an occasional failure in the general parallelism of geological antiquity with simplicity of organic type, that the order of appearance of species had not in fact been progressive, and the result of gradual modification through natural descent. The difficulties raised by the conservative paleontologists logically justified, at the utmost, only a Scotch verdict of “not proven”—so far as this part of the testimony is concerned.
This continued to be the logical situation in 1859 and for a number of years thereafter. Darwin wrote to Quatrefages:
THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 541
My views spread slowly in England and America; and I am much surprised to find them most commonly accepted by geologists, next by botanists, and least by zoologists; ... for the arguments from geology have always seemed strongest against me.
That the objection from the general absence of intermediate links between species was a pertinent one he acknowledged with characteristic candor.
Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain;
and this is perhaps the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory.
He recognized that, so far as geological knowledge then went, whole groups of species sometimes seemed to make their appearance abruptly ; though he argued that the increase of such knowledge had steadily tended to diminish this semblance of abruptness. Wholly eliminated these sharp transitions have never been, to this day; the latest authori- tative expositor of the general results of paleontology says of d’Orbigny that, though “his ideas” were “too absolute, his observations remain none the less exact in their broad lines, and the sudden replacing of marine faunas, when passing from one stage to another, or even from zone to zone, must be considered almost a general rule.” The same writer,°° who is, of course, a convinced evolutionist, observes:
After all we can not forget that there exists an immense number of creatures without intermediate links, and that the relations of the great divisions of the animal or vegetable kingdom are much less strict than the theory demands. . .. The keenest partisan of the descent theory must admit that the fossil links between the classes and orders of the two kingdoms exist in infinitesimally small numbers.
The second argument of the paleontological opponents of the theory Darwin regarded as still more deserving of serious consideration.
The sudden manner in which several groups of species first appear in our European formations, the almost entire absence, as at present known, of formations rich in fossils beneath the Cambrian strata, are all undoubtedly of the most serious nature. The difficulty of assigning any good reason for the absence of vast piles of strata rich in fossils beneath the Cambrian system is very great. ... The case at present must remain inexplicable, and may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views here entertained.”
To all these objections, as to that drawn from the absence of a uni- formly progressive sequence in the superposition of species of certain classes, Darwin opposed a single reply: “ the imperfection of the geolog- ical record ”—an imperfection due not only to the inadequacy of geo- logical exploration but to the inevitable absence of many chapters from the rock-history itself. Paleontology thus offered to neither side materials for a decisive proof of its case. Darwin’s ninth chapter pre-
” Depéret, “ The Transformations of the Animal World,” 1909, p. 22; the following passage, p. 113.
"Citations are from “Origin of Species,” sixth edition, ch. X., passim; this was ch. IX. of the first edition.
542 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY
sented these considerations in a masterly manner. But there was no time in the history of paleontology when they were not extremely obvi- ous and familiar considerations. Chambers, in replying to his critics, had fallen back upon the argument from the inconclusiveness of nega- tive evidence. Even Hugh Miller, without greatly profiting by his own precept, had pointed out “how unsafe it is for the geologist to base positive conclusions on merely negative data.”** And Spencer, in a brilliant article written in 1858,°* and published in the Universal Review** in July, 1859, had urged that “along with continuity of life on the earth’s surface, there not only may be, but must be, great gaps in the series of fossils;” and that “ hence these gaps are no evidence against the doctrine of evolution.” He concluded:
It must be admitted that the facts of Paleontology can never suflice either to prove or disprove the Development Hypothesis; but that the most they can do is, to show whether the last few pages of the Earth’s biologic history are or are not in harmony with this hypothesis.
In its later development, it is true, paleontology has been able to produce some striking supplementary evidences of evolution. In a lim- ited number of cases, approximately complete and closely graduated series of forms of single orders or families can be exhibited in due stratigraphic superposition. But all the elaborate and impressive “ form-series ” have been worked out since 1859. Darwin himself made no original discoveries in this field; and as late as the sixth edition of the “ Origin” the best evidence of the sort he presented from other writers is, I believe, summed up in these two sentences:
Several cases are on record of the same species presenting varieties in the upper and lower parts of the same formation. Thus Trautschold gives a number of instances with Ammonites, and Hilgendorf has described a most curious case
of ten graduated forms of Planorbis multiformis in the successive beds of a fresh-water formation in Switzerland.
Of the two instances cited the first is vague—the great studies of Waagen (1869) and of Neumayr (1871-5) in the Ammonites were still to come; and the observations of Hilgendorf seem already, by the time the sixth edition of the “ Origin ” was prepared for the press, to have been shown to be erroneous.** The best known example, to English readers, of a form-series is that of the Equide. But Riitimeyer’s “ Beitrige zur Kenntnis der fossilen Pferde” appeared only in 1863; and Huxley’s researches in this field, which were the consequence, not the cause, of his acceptance of the theory of descent, were first pre- sented to the public in his presidential address before the Geological Society in 1870.
6. The Argument from Persistent Types.—If good cases of gradu-
2“ Footsteps of the Creator,” p. 32.
%3“ Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer,” II., 332.
™* Reprinted in “ Illustrations of Universal Progress,” 1868, pp. 361, 376. * Cf. O. Schmidt, “ Descent and Darwinism,” 1873, English tr., 1296, p. 96.
THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 543
ated form-series were not available at the time of the “Origin” or before, the evolutionist of the period could still find in paleontology one sort of evidence decidedly unfavorable to the chief hypothesis then opposed to his own—that of extensive “revolutions of the globe,” wholesale obliterations of faunas, and thorough-going new creations of the entire organic world. This evidence lay in the persistence of many orders and certain species through more than one geological epoch. The classic of the special creation doctrine was the introduction to the third edition of Cuvier’s “ Récherches sur les ossements fossiles ” ; and the principal argument of that work was, in the words of one of Cuvier’s disciples,** to the effect that “ no fossil species, at least among the two classes of mammalia and reptilia, has any analogue among liv- ing species, or, in other words, that every fossil species is extinct.” If this could be shown by positive evidence not to be the case, one of the principal supports of the special creation hypothesis was taken away from it. Huxley made much of this line of attack in a paper of 1859 and in his address before the Geological Society in 1862. He pointed out, for example, that lingula and certain mollusca “have persisted from the Silurian epoch to the present day, with so little change that com- petent malacologists are sometimes puzzled to distinguish the ancient from the modern species.” He noted that the “group of crocodilia was represented at the beginning of the Mesozoic age, if not earlier, by species identical in the character of their organization with those now living”; and that, probably, even certain types of the ancient mam- malian fauna, such as that of the marsupialia, have persisted with no greater change throughout as vast a lapse of time.”
But the argument Huxley here used had not newly become available. Cuvier’s generalization had gone far beyond any evidence which he had offered, or which could, in the nature of the case, be offered. The proposition was, indeed, insusceptible of proof, save by a sort of reasoning in a circle. For when the special creationists denied the sur- vival of species from one epoch to another, they were using the word “species ” in a sense different from that in which they, at least, usually employed it. In their zoology, the final test of specific difference be- tween two forms was the sterility of the hybrid. But extinct forms can not be subjected to this test. In paleontology, therefore, differences of species had to be determined solely on grounds of morphological dis- similarity; while it was, at the same time, recognized that in living animals an immense range of such dissimilarity might be consistent with identity of physiological species. If the pug dog and the grey- hound had been extinct, it is at least questionable whether paleontol- ogists would have assigned them to the same species—especially if their remains had been found at different geological horizons. Under such
** Flourens, “ Analyse raisonée des travaux de G. Cuvier,” 1841.
544 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY
circumstances, it was open to the paleontologist to multiply species almost ad libitum; if he had adopted a theory which required that no species found in one stratum should be found in another, it was easy to make the most of slight variations of form. Differentiations of species thus made, however, were essentially subjective; all that could con- ceivably have been proven objectively was that no form remained the same through successive geological periods. Yet even of this no proof was forthcoming; the geologic record was not the sort of document that could furnish proof for a universal negative. It furnished, in fact, evi- dence on the other side. Even Cuvier’s eulogist had been obliged (1841) to limit the generalization by adding “at least among mam- mals and reptiles ”—and then to make further exception of two orders of mammals. And Hitchcock in his “The Religion of Geology” (1852), while exaggerating the discontinuity of then known types, could say no more than that, “of the thirty thousand species of ani- mals and plants found in the rocks, very few living species can be de- tected.” But a few were as good as a multitude as witnesses to the fact that there had been no such complete, simultaneous extinctions of faunas, and radical alterations of terrestrial conditions, as the Cuvier- ian theory supposed.** And we find Chambers, in 1844, citing specific examples of persistency, as Huxley was to do fifteen years later.
There is a badger of the Miocene which can not be distinguished from the badger of the present day. Our existing Meles tarus is therefore acknowledged by Mr. Owen to be “the oldest known species of mammal on the face of the earth.” It is in like manner impossible to discover any difference between the existing wild cat and that which lived in the bone caves with the hyena, rhinoceros and tiger of the ante-drift era, all of which are said to be extinct species. . . . There is a persistency of certain shells since the beginning of the tertiaries. . . . Several shells of the secondary formation straggling into the tertiaries are not less conclusive, in rigid reasoning, that all the tertiary species were descended from the secondary, though the wide unrepresented interval at that point allowed a greater transition of forms. In short, the whole of the divisions constructed by geologists upon the supposition of extensive intro- ductions of totally new vehicles of life must give way before the application of
this rule, and it must be seen that what they call new species are but variations of the old.™
%. The Argument from the Recapitulation Theory.—In charging Chambers with prematurity in his acceptance of evolutionism, Pro- fessor Le Conte urged that “the foundation, the only solid foundation, of a true theory of evolution” is to be had solely in “ the method of
* It was, indeed, possible to restate the special creation theory so as to avoid this difficulty; extinctions and fresh productions of species, one at a time, might be supposed to have taken place continuously, without any general or widespread “revolutions of the globe.” Such a conception was put forward by Bronn in 1857. But when thus amended the theory was pretty manifestly in a state of hopeless overstrain. It now made miraculous interpositions a matter of, so to say, almost daily occurrence in the geologic history. << Explanations,” 1846, p. 108 f.
THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 545
comparison of the phylogenic and the embryonic succession,” and in the resultant principle that “the laws of embryonic development (ontogeny) are also the laws of geologic succession.” This method and this principle Le Conte represented as “added” to biology by Agassiz. Holding such views of the importance and the date of origin of the recapitulation theory, Le Conte concluded that no one was reasonably entitled to believe in the transformation of species prior to the publication of the work of Agassiz; and hence that Chambers’s evolutionism was a “ baseless speculation.”*® Le Conte’s popular book has done much to form current ideas on this subject. But its author was misled by piety towards the memory of his greatest teacher into a serious neglect of chronology, in a matter where chronology is of the essence of the question at issue. Even if Agassiz be regarded as the originator of the doctrine of recapitulation, it must be remembered that he announced his evidences for that doctrine in his “ Poissons du vieux grés rouge,” 1842-44, and repeated them in popular form in his Lowell Lectures of 1848.4° And in point of fact, the doctrine and an impor- tant mass of evidence for it had then long been familiar; so that one finds Lyell, before 1835, arguing against the use of it as a proof of evolution. In the “ Principles of Geology,” he wrote:
There is yet another department of anatomical discovery to which I must allude, because it has appeared to some persons to afford a distant analogy, at least, to that progressive development by which some of the inferior animals may have gradually been perfected into those of more complex organization. Tiedemann found, and his discoveries have been most fully confirmed and elucidated by M. Serres, that the brain of the foetus assumes, in succession, forms analogous to those which belong to fishes, birds and reptiles before it acquires the additions and modifications peculiar to the mammiferous tribe. So that in the passage from the embryo to the perfect mammifer, there is a typical repre- sentation, as it were, of all those transformations which the primitive species
are supposed to have undergone, during a long series of generations, between the present period and the remotest geological era.
Lyell’s reply to this argument was brief and dogmatic: he fully ad- mitted the facts, but denied the inference. ,
It will be observed that these curious phenomena disclose, in a highly inter- esting manner, the unity of plan that runs through the organization of the whole series of vertebrated animals; but they lend no support whatever to the notion of a gradual transmutation of one species into another; least of ull, of the passage, in the course of many generations, from an animal of a more simple to one of a more complex structure.
To the mind of Darwin the same sort of data presented a very dif- ferent import.
” Le Conte, “ Evolution in its Relation to Religious Thought,” 2d ed., 1905, ch, II.: The Relation of Louis Agassiz to the Theory of Evolution.
“ Cf. Agassiz’s own words, cited in Marcou, “ Louis Agassiz,” I., 230; and Morgan, “Evolution and Adaptation,” p. 61. “First American edition, 1837, I., 526.
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As it seems to me, the leading facts in embryology, which are second to none in importance, are explained on the principle of variations in the many descendants from some one ancient progenitor, having appeared at a not very early period in life, and having been inherited at a corresponding period. Embryology rises greatly in interest, when we look at the embryo as a picture, more or less obscured, of the progenitor, either in its adult or larval state, of all the members of the same great class.”
Yet poor Chambers is reproached for “baseless speculation ” be- cause, looking upon facts accepted by all the competent embryologists of his time, he saw in them the meaning that Darwin afterwards saw, and that so great a mind as Lyell’s had been unable to see. In the third edition of the “ Vestiges,” 1845, he wrote:
First surmised by the illustrious Harvey, afterwards illustrated by Hunter in his wondrous collection at the Royal College of Surgeons, finally advanced to mature conclusions by Tiedemann, St. Hilaire and Serres, embryotic develop- ment is now a science. Its primary positions are... (2) that the embryos of all animals pass through a series of phases of development, each of which is the type or analogue of the permanent configuration of tribes inferior to it in the scale.
And in this Chambers found one of his chief evidences of trans- formation of species. Elsewhere in this edition he devotes several pages to the elaboration of the argument from recapitulation in the case of the brain. “ Taking as a basis the scale of animated nature as presented in Dr. Fletcher’s ‘ Rudiments of Physiology,’ ” he points out “ the wonder- ful parity observed in the progress of creation, as presented to our ob- servation in the succession of fossils, and also in the foetal progress of one of the principal human organs.”**
8. The Argument from Rudimentary Organs.—In his “ Lectures on the Phenomena of Organic Nature,” 1863, Huxley mentions as il- lustrations of this type of evidence the fcetal teeth of the whalebone whale, the rudimentary toes in the horse’s leg, the rudimentary teeth in the upper jaw of the cali. He concludes:
Upon any hypothesis of special creation, facts of this kind appear to me entirely unaccountable and inexplicable; but they cease to be so if you accept Mr. Darwin’s hypothesis, and see reason for believing that the whalebone whale and the whale with teeth in its mouth, both sprang from a whale that had teeth, and that the teeth of the fetal whale are merely remnants—recollections if we may so say—of the extinct whale. . . . The existence of identical struc- tural roots, if I may so term them, entering into the composition of widely different animals, is striking evidence in favor of the descent of those animals from a common original.
But from the same facts Chambers had argued to the same conclu- sion nearly a score of years earlier.
The baleen of the whale and the teeth of the land mammals are different
organs. The whale in embryo shows the rudiments of teeth; but these not being wanted, are not developed, and the baleen is brought forward instead.
““ Origin of Species,” sixth edition, ch. XIV. *“ Vestiges,” third edition, 1845.
THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 547
He mentions also the existence of rudimentary toes in the horse, the rudimentary feet of serpents, the undeveloped wings of the ostrich, the teats of male mammals, the os coccygis in man. “ The single fact of the existence of abortive or rudimentary organs condemns” the “idea of a separate creation for each organic form; . . . for these, on such a supposition could be regarded in no other light than as blemishes or blunders.” Such a thing was “ most irreconcilable with that idea of Almighty Perfection ” which the special creationists were at least as anxious as the author of the “ Vestiges” to maintain. Chambers gave the argument, here, a pious turn which did not increase its logical force. But he made the main point plain enough. The special creation theory could make nothing of rudimentary organs; viewed in the light of the theory of development, as incidental to natural descent with gradual modification, they appeared normal, in- telligible and instructive.
It is worth while, perhaps, before concluding, to bring the last six arguments together, in a single general view of their logical bearings. No one of them, nor all of them collectively, ever amounted to more than “ circumstantial evidence ” of the transformation of species; none of them actually exhibits any species in flagrante delicto of transmuta- tion. These arguments got their force from the fact that, when taken together, they fitted with striking nicety into the requirements of one of the two possible hypotheses about the origin of species—a hypothesis already recommended on general grounds of scientific method; while they reduced the rival hypothesis to a grotesque absurdity. “ Con- ceivable” that other hypothesis still remained, as Huxley contended. It was, and is, possible, by making a sufficient number of supplementary suppositions, to give to the special creation doctrine a form in which it is neither explicitly self-contradictory nor explicitly in conflict with any fact established by pure induction. But when thus fitted out with the epicycles required by the facts already known to the science of 1840, the doctrine certainly presented a singularly odd and whimsical appearance. It implied that the Creator had produced the different types of organisms by fits and starts, strewing them at irregular inter- vals along the vast reaches of geologic time. Precisely what happened on one of these interesting occasions, the hypothesis left in a baffling obscurity; after a somewhat extensive reading in the literature of the period, I can not recall that any special creationist replied to Spencer’s request for particulars on this point. Spencer wrote in 1852:
Let them tell us how a new species is constructed and how it makes its
appearance. Is it thrown down from the clouds? or must we hold to the notion that it struggles up out of the ground? Do its limbs and viscera rush together
““Vestiges,” American (= third) edition, 1845, pp. 145-149. Chambers unluckily adds: “The land animals, we may be sure, have the rudiments of baleen in their organization.”
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from all points of the compass? Or must we receive the old Hebrew idea that God takes clay and molds a new creature?
On these matters the theory remained judiciously non-committal. But it maintained, at all events, that the vast majority of species, how- ever created, were destined to be in turn destroyed—and destroyed by the operation of natural forces. The Great Artificer could fashion, but he was either unable or unwilling to protect, the creatures his imagina- tion had devised. When ordinary physical processes were too much for them, sweeping them off by groups, or even, according to the favorite variant of the theory, obliterating them altogether, he was obliged to start afresh; whether this happened four or twelve or twenty-seven or thirty thousand times was a detail about which the partisans of the doctrine could not agree. The forms thus later produced did not al- ways differ markedly for the better from their unfortunate precursors ; many primitive and rather unsuccessful models continued to be re- peated. But in general, as time went on, the Creator brought both more diverse and more complicated beings into existence. In doing so, he behaved after the manner of a lazy and incompetent architect, who, instead of “studying” each problem afresh, with reference to the special uses and situation of the edifice to be erected, is content to make a few minor alterations in a single conventionalized plan. The “ unity of type” of organisms destined to the most dissimilar modes of exist- ence was generally dilated upon with devout enthusiasm by the special creationists. They seem to have regarded it as an agreeable mannerism of the Creator’s personal style. But it is the kind of mannerism which, in a human designer, is commonly ascribed to indolence or limited in- telligence. Indeed, the parallel of the lazy architect was inadequate to represent the whole singularity of the Creator’s mode of construction. He not only used as few general models as possible, but he also—when, with a cleared field, he created a fresh group of organisms—repro- duced in them organs and members which had been functional and useful in their predecessors, but were with the new species useless, meaningless, and even disadvantageous—like the proverbial Chinese tailor, who laboriously imitates all the rents and stains in the dis- carded European garment given him as a model. Finally, the Creator was supposed to have implanted in all organisms the senseless habit of mimicking, in the embryonic stages of the individual’s development, the forms of other and extinct organisms to which that individual bore no relation of kinship.
Such—with the details absolutely required by the accepted scien- tific knowledge of the time—was the hypothesis tenaciously held by most men of science for at least twenty years before 1859. With the greater number of them the motives for holding it were primarily theological; yet the thing that now impresses us in the theory is its extraordinarily irreligious, not to say blasphemous, character. Science
THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES
549
might conceivably, after some fashion, have made shift with a hypoth- esis of this kind; but it is hard to see how any one could suppose it in any degree advantageous to religion. It had not even the poor merit of being anthropomorphic. For no man out of a madhouse ever be- haved in such a manner as that in which, by this hypothesis, the Creator _of the universe was supposed to have behaved. Ascribing to him both the ability and the disposition to intervene with absolute freedom in natural—or, at least, in organic—phenomena, the theory also repre- sented him as incapable of intervening intelligently or effectually.
That men of great abilities were unable to see the true character of the hypothesis which great numbers of them so long embraced, is cer- tainly an interesting, if not an encouraging, fact in the history of the human intellect. But the capacity of theological prepossessions and religious feeling to retard and confuse intellectual processes is an old story. More remarkable, perhaps, is the failure, for an equally long period, of a number of men not impeded by theological prepossessions —men who were capable of seeing the absurdities of the special creation hypothesis—to recognize the methodological superiority and the promise of scientific fruitfulness inhering in the other hypothesis, or even to recognize the logical obligation to choose between the only two hypoth- eses available. Men of science of the present generation have perhaps little to learn from a consideration of the reasons which prevented a Cuvier, a Miller, a Sedgwick or an Agassiz from accepting the theory of evolution. But there may still be for us profitable matter for re- flection in a consideration of the reasons which prevented a Huxley from finding, in 1846, anything of value in facts and reasonings which thirteen years later he was, with unequalled vigor and skill, proclaim- ing from the housetops.
The only historian of English thought known to me who has quite truly stated what I believe to be the fact about this episode in the his- tory of scientific opinion, is Mr. A. W. Benn. In his “ Modern Eng- land 4° he observes concerning the “ Vestiges ”:
Hardly any advance has since been made on Chambers’ general arguments,
which at the time they appeared would have been accepted as convincing, but for theological truculence and scientific timidity. And Chambers himself only
gave unity to thoughts already in wide circulation. . . . Chambers was not a scientific expert, nor altogether an original thinker, but he had studied scientific literature to better purpose than any professor. . . . The considerations that
now recommend evolution to popular audiences are no other than those urged in the “ Vestiges.”
The truth of this is, I think, by no means sufficiently recognized by biologists or by historians of science. I hope that the present study may somewhat contribute to the more general acknowledgment of the cor- rectness of Mr. Benn’s statement.
1908, II., 307, I., 238.
THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY
AN ARRAIGNMENT OF THE THEORIES OF MIMICRY AND WARNING COLORS
By ABBOTT H. THAYER
There is every reason to believe that all animals’ eyes see upon one prin- ciple, an eye being a machine for receiving what we call light vibrations, so that to receive from any object more of these vibrations is to have it look lighter, and to receive from it less of them is to have it look darker.
i the last few years, naturalists have received from outside their ranks, the first scientific analysis of the use of animal’s colors that has ever been made.
They have been shown the effacing power of the universal counter- shading in animals’ costumes, and later, they have seen with their own eyes the equally perfect effacing power of the patterns which up to that moment they had believed to be factors of conspicuousness.t They have thus been forced to perceive that all their own theories prove to have been built in ignorance. These were made before the world had perceived the universal importance of employing specialists, and even Darwin and Wallace failed to realize that in view of nature’s infinity, one study like their own was all that they could hope to be faithful to. The laws of visibility reach, like all others, into infinity, and could not constitute part of the zoologist’s field, while in the science of the painter, these laws are the very pith of his study.
The following demonstration of the fallacy of the badge and warn- ing-color theories is not, in the same sense, an attack upon mimicry, al- though it inevitably calls attention to the fact that the latter can not survive the demise of these other theories. It does not imply that there is no case possible of protective resemblance of one animal by another, but contents itself with bringing forward conclusive evidence that the great mass of what is now called mimicry is nothing of the kind, but is, in every respect, the same common concealing coloration everywhere to be found where there are common habits and environment. This fact escaped naturalists, simply because it lay out of their special field, 7. ¢., in optics rather than in zoology, and once off the track, they have been driven step by step into the erection of a wholly fictitious fabric, where no fabric at all was required.
1T have shown, both to the naturalists at Woods Hole, Mass., and in Lon- don, the wonderful concealing power of various representative “ conspicuous ” costumes, from white patterned birds seen against the sky, to the bright red- black-and-yellow coral snake, supposed to be one of the most conspicuous animals in nature.
THEORIES OF MIMICRY 551
The universal tendency of common habits and environment to be accompanied by common form and appearance has long been a familiar fact, and no one would have conceived of a vast gap in this tendency but that naturalists thought themselves forced to accept the evidence that such a gap existed, and set themselves to work to fill it as best they could. Now, however, the obstacle to their discovering the wholly con- cealing character of the whole array of costumes that had puzzled them vanishes, and no power can withhold this array from taking its place in the ranks of universal procryptic coloration.
The following pages demonstrate that all diversification of the colors of animals’ costumes tends wholly and unmixedly to conceal them. This should set the believers in conspicuous species reflecting that while they are making their records of cases of momentary con- spicuousness of individuals of one species or another, they are making no investigation whatever of the possibility that all the while a large number of individuals of this same species are, through some magic of their costume, escaping their sight and making no impression on their minds. It is precisely to such an investigation as this that I here invite the reader.
Any out-of-door naturalist knows that if he walk through a sunny field of fairly profuse vegetation, after first studying it, say, from an upper window, he will flush an immensely greater amount of so-called conspicuous aerial life than he had detected from the window, and he will believe that much of this life was all the time within the field of his vision.
These plates have been prepared with the especial purpose of ex- posing the weakness of the optical hypotheses upon which the theories of “ warning-colors,” “recognition,” “mimicry,” etc., so largely rest. They show that these hypotheses would never have lived a day had their originators begun by testing them. Darwin’s erroneous supposition that a conspicuous mark on an object makes the object itself conspicuous has been built on and rebuilt on by the leaders of zoological research, even down to the present day. Entomologists, especially, make much of the supposed power of sharp and strong patterns to render con- spicuous that particular part of the insect which they occupy. We now discover that the effect of these patterns is the very opposite. In the illustrations of this article we see the actual effect of such marks in several typical situations. Fig. 1 shows two butterflies and several letters, all of one color, and against one background. On each butterfly and on several of the letters bright spots or patterns have been painted. As the spectator recedes, those parts of the butterflies nearest the bright patterns fade, until, at a short distance, they are invisible, while the rest of the insect is clearlv distinguishable up to a much greater dis-
552 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY
tance. The same thing is true of the letters, the unmarked ones being legible much farther than the others. Fig. 2 shows exactly the same effect with reversed colors. That part of the gray butterfly next the black ocellus fades, as one recedes, until it becomes pure white like the background, leaving the rest of the butterfly to continue visible at a | much greater distance. In both these cases the effect of conspicuous pattern proves to be the exact reverse of the old hypothesis on which the Bates and Wallace theories so largely rest. Figs. 3 and 4 will, I think, still more surprise the many writers who, from Darwin and Wallace down to the present time, are accustomed to say of one or another bril- liantly pied species, that its patterns are so conspicuous that one can see it a hundred yards off. It is here shown that it can not be the brilliancy or conspicuousness of the animal’s patterns that enables them thus to see him from afar, since these very characters here produce the opposite effect. The reader will discover, in looking from a greater and greater distance, that it is the normally colored, strongly pied butterfly and skunk, respectively, that fade first, and that all of the remaining six figures can be seen further. (These can be tested not only by distance, but by decreased illumination, and, especially for the latter means, a still more satisfactory test of the skunk can be made by using |
|
|
. ee
life-size figures and turning down the lights in a hall, or studying them out of doors as night comes on.) He will discover that the supposed white blazon actually serves to efface the black animal on a nearer view | (especially if seen through the leaves). He can not fail, either, to per- ceive that an all-white skunk, being exempt from the risk of giving an | impression of two different things, a black one, and a white one, would in the long run, be, also, the more recognizable when seen against any ground, except snow.** It is not yet generally perceived that in the | scenery about us every spot means to a casual observer one thing, and it follows that two different color-patches, as of the skunk, amidst the million color-patches in sight, tend, especially when more or less eclipsed by vegetation, to mean, not one pied animal, but two different elements of the scene. It must be remembered that the skunk’s scene is a night scene, commonly abounding, in wild places, in black shadow masses relieved here and there by light spots made by bleached twigs, fragments of fallen birches, shining wet spots, etc., and, what is by far the most essential fact, with all visibility whatsoever at the minimum. In fact the whole “ warning-color ” theory in the case of these nocturnal species smacks of the laboratory. For instance, although skunks abound all ?In most butterflies, the body itself is wonderfully effaced by having its color blent off into the wing; yet it profits greatly by the effacing-power of the strong pattern to right and left. ** To learn the superiority of monochrome for identification, paint a uniform
tone over a chiselled inscription that has become hard to read because of weather-stains, and instantly it is as legible as when it was first cut.
FIG. 2
Figs, 1 and 2 show that bright sharp pattern obliterates, instead of rendering conspicuous,
the form on which it is painted; and that its details are left to seem to be part of the similar details of the background. Test these facts by receding from the picture.
FIG. 4
Fics. 3 anp 4. Here the spectator will find, as he recedes or turns down the light, that all the monochrome figures, even the dimmest, can be seen further, or in a less illumination, than the two normally and brightly patterned ones. These latter fade first. They show how con- trasted juxtaposed color-notes destroy each other, so that, contrary to the current theories,
monochrome is far better both for revealing the wearer, and also for proclaiming his identity amidst the innumerable details of wild places.
THEORIES OF MIMICRY 553 over the premises of American country folk, it is very rare to see one of them, except by encountering him in the hen-house. This is the more significant in view of their well-known temerity and disinclination: to get out of one’s way. Their white pattern, if seen at all, and even when observed to move, is easily mistaken for some inanimate detail of the scene, some shifting shine on a wet leaf, or other of the above- mentioned light-colored details of the place. There seldom pass many minutes without some breeze to set in motion the many more or less white details of the shrubbery, so that the disembodied light patch of this little hunter’s coat may move, even within the short visibility-range that we have discovered it to possess, yet by no means commonly attract our attention. It is certainly the universal experience of American country dwellers that although in their domestic duties they must fre- quently pass within a few feet of skunks, yet the whole family together scarcely see one a year. Under shrubbery, moonlight, which might be expected to reveal these animals, adds, on the contrary, to the scene hundreds of white patterns, and these often all in motion, so that what was before a comparatively negative form of concealment becomes a most brilliant and positive illusion. The skunk’s pattern so absolutely reproduces the hundred surrounding ones, often all shifting in a thou- sand directions, that even when the animal is near enough to be seen, he is almost sure to escape detection. Dr. Merriam first called my attention to this, and also to a very clear statement of it by Verrill. Merriam says that spilogales amidst cactus shadows in moonlight are practically impossible to follow with the eye. It is easy to see that this must apply to the appearance of all the other top-patterned species under similar circumstances. This is one more instance of increased illumination producing increased procryptic effect, such as we also see in the operation of counter-shading.
These simple diagrams, then, prove that it is not the diversification into brilliantly contrasted pattern that makes its wearer conspicuous, or that is the most efficacious way to make him recognizable. It is the very juxtaposition of the skunk’s black that makes his white fade out of sight at a short distance, and in a nearer view, amidst the many light spots likely to be in sight, one more has often no significancé to a spec- tator; but if this light color took the full shape of a skunk, then, of course, it would make him recognizable. In the next plates we shall see what is the main cause of the frequent conspicuousness, during motion, of all aerial species, or of any that by virtue of being taller than others, are, to these lower-level observers, practically the same as aerial, because of looming against their sky.
But let us turn aside to notice the circumstances of the species already recognized by naturalists as procryptically colored. These are merely such species as live, or rest by day, in actual contact with their
vol. LXxv. 37.
554 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY
background, and, as now proves to be the case with practically the whole animal kingdom, wear its colors (or some of them).
Bark moths, terrestrial animals in general, terrestrial habited birds, etc., all such species, when thus in actual contact with their back- grounds, share its varying illumination from minute to minute. The patch of sunlight that falls on the squatting woodcock illumines also
w
Fic. 5 shows the revealing-effect of being seen against a contrasting back- ground, and illustrates the fact that no aerial creature can go about at all without constantly passing acrcss both revealing and concealing backgrounds.
the surrounding ground, so that the bird continues to seem a part of it; and the same is of course true of the rest of this great class of animal. But a very different fate attends the life of aerial species destined con- stantly to appear against more or less distant backgrounds which do not share their particular momentary illumination, and which constantly show, now light, when the flying bird or butterfly is dark, and the next instant dark when he is light. This fate causes all aerial species, in a very vital sense, to be conspicuous. Fig. 5 illustrates this. On the white of the sky a white butterfly has been pasted, which, of course, does not show. In the same way, a black one has been placed upon the darkest part of the tree’s shadow, and a ground-colored one on the ground. Both of these, like the white one, are, of course, practically invisible, and, could they be always seen against these same _ back- grounds, they might be classed as cryptic. But their habits preclude the possibility of this, their own changes of position, not to speak of those of the spectator, bringing them, as they fly about, across, often in a single second, the whole gamut of backgrounds, from brightest sky to deepest tree-shadow, and back. And against every one, except the single one which they match, they are clearly visible. The black one shows against the sky, the ground, etc., the white one against the various
THEORIES OF MIMICRY 555 darks, and so forth. Nor is it only their varying background that dooms them to visibility. Their flight carries them with equal speed through a series of metamorphoses of their own aspect. Now, for an instant of their passage, they are themselves practically black, because of being in deep shadow, and are perhaps seen against a bright sky- space. The next has brought them out into full sunlight, and they blaze bright against a new background of perhaps inky darkness. The principle of the inevitable visibility produced by this swift succession of visible moments, though alternating with repeated vanishings, is well illustrated by the complete visibility of landscape through the cracks in
A B
Fic. 6. In this figure the two inconspicuous butterflies in the middle show the effacing-power of pattern when it repeats the background. At the left a butterfly of the same costume is represented passing through a moment of illumination too great to admit of its patterns’ still cutting it apart into notes of the background. At the right a butterfly of the same pattern is going through the reverse experience, being for an instant too much in shadow for its pattern to save it from appearing as one single dark form against the light space beyond. ‘This illustration reminds one how perpetually such vicissitudes must succeed each other in the life of such species.
a board fence, to the eyes of any one passing swiftly by. The view recurs again and again to the retina, in time to keep up the image. This is why the average observer thinks he sees these butterflies through all their course. This plate only goes so far as to show how fatal to invisibility it is to have the wrong background. Fig. 6 illustrates the above explanation of that perpetual disharmony between flying species and their background which plays fast and loose, part of every second, with all their patterns’ power to cut their forms into deceptive shapes, by making them, so constantly, first so bright against dark that all parts, even the blackest, fall into one light silhouette, and then so dark in shadow, against bright light, that even their white parts join the rest in one dark silhouette. These two climaxes of visibility, first one and then the other, occur in the flight of a bird or butterfly often at the rate of several a second, while, during the rest of the second, the creature is effaced by passing a background that his costume matches, and by
556 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY
being, as in the case of the butterflies A and B, midway between the extremes, favored by the momentary illumination’s being neither too great nor too small. Even in the climaxes of conspicuousness his patterns still perpetually lessen his visibility in direct ratio to their strength. And when he is chased by an enemy every instant of con- fusion as to where he leaves off and the background begins must often save him, so that the brighter his light marks and the deeper his dark ones, the greater the range of background he can meet without sil- houetting as an entirety, and being for the instant conspicuous. One advantage which patterns do certainly sacrifice in purchasing the above advantages is that, although their wearer is never seen entire until the background is too dark for his black, or too light for his white, yet it is true that, on the other hand, some note of a pied costume is always to be detected moving when the wearer moves. In this respect, monotone, whenever at rare moments it exactly matches its background, has the advantage. This fact additionally condemns the aerial animal to detec- tion when he moves, yet it is often rather his motion than his form that becomes noticeable, because each of his patterns still has the chance of passing for something beyond him.
Fig. 7 shows one of the cardinal effects of patterns. C is a bird patterned in white, black and gray. Seen against the sky he loses his white part—against the dark he loses his dark part—and against the gray, his gray part. .
Now when we find that pattern works always for concealment in direct ratio to its own conspicuousness and elaboration, there remains no vestige of evidence that the specific recognizability of the of course constant pattern of each species has had, even to the slightest degree, a hand in the evolution of such pattern. And those who would still claim for conspicuous patterns any other reason for being than conceal- ment of their wearer must first show what patterns could in the slightest degree better serve procryptic ends, under the circumstances, than the very ones now in use; and also what ones would less aid identification.®
There are two groups of supposed warningly-colored animals that seem particularly to lend themselves to the exposure of the weakness of
* Naturalists confound identification with mere detection. Our identifica- tion of familiar objects depends, fundamentally, upon unvaryingness of their appearance. We know the mink just as well by his slim form and sleek dark monochrome as the skunk by his fatter form and bushy black and white. The skunk, by the way, varies in appearance far more than the mink, ranging from nearly all black to half white, and this is another evidence that his pattern is not for identification. Naturalists’ assertion that patterns serve equally both purposes is like two men claiming the same dog. The wise judge puts it to the test as to which man the dog will obey against the commands of the other. If we call animals’ costumes the dog, we find that he always obeys Master Con-
cealment, but obeys Master Warning-color only when Master Concealment has commanded the same thing.
THEORIES OF MIMICRY 557 these theories. These are the carnivora which bear anal stink-glands, and, among insects, those armed with stings at their rear end. In the
first place, very few of these species wear the so-called badge conspicu-
ae _ . 7 a
Fic. 7 shows the fundamental optically disruptive effect of pattern. Against each background the bird loses that part of its form which matches it.
ously near their weapon, or anywhere that would call attention to the situation of such weapon. (Entomologists have been keen to cite any
558 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY
supposed cases of the contrary arrangement, any apparent association of “badge” and armament.) In the second place, the coloration of all the members of these groups proves to be the most perfect imaginable concealing coloration, picturing the details in the most exquisitely true colors of the very background against which it is most dangerous for their wearer to be detected (commonly that of their feeding ground). While, on the other hand, apparently no brilliant colors at all are found in any branch of the world of above-ground animal life, either in air or water, where no such colors are typical of any of the animal’s back- grounds, no matter how much these animals may need advertising.
The famous black and gold, the supposed blazon of offensiveness, so characteristic of the wasp and bee family, is the utmost picture of the sunlit vegetation which they haunt, with the golden stamens of flowers, the yellow of fruit, and the dark interstices. Were this coloration really such a blazon, why does nature deny it to the hordes of stinging ants that often swarm within a few feet of the wasps, but wear only the com- paratively dull tones that match the bark and earth surfaces to which their general lack of wings condemns their lives? (Such red as is found in ants’ costumes is a universal detail of the forest débris.)
So ingrained is the time-honored conception that such a creature as a golden-patterned wasp, as he bustles among the flowers, owes his con- spicuousness at least in part to his costume, that only actual personal experiment with the laws herein shown can dispel it. Not till nat- uralists give up collecting records of cases of conspicuousness, and begin to inquire by experiment whether any more procryptic coloration could, under the animal’s circumstances, be devised, will they have begun at all the study of this subject. One day’s investigation of this kind would greatly astonish them, and they would end by discovering that it is unequivocally the wasp’s actions that condemn it to so much visibility, and this in spite of its wearing, as far as they can discover, every avail- able form of concealment-coloration.
As to the supposed warningly colored carnivores, the light-colored marks that are considered as badges are often prominently concentrated upon the animal’s face and front top, and in no case equally prom- inently arranged near his rear. Being always on the creature’s sky-lit surfaces, they obliterate him to the eyes of beholders from a lower level, such as the seeing portion of his small terrestrial victims. In doing this they fall into the universal class of concealing coloration. Fig. 12 illustrates this function, and the previous illustrations have shown that this same white, so perfect an auxiliary of the animal’s feeding opera- tions, is not, in other views, unfavorable to its concealment.
Let us now find out what traits and habits in these groups do con- stantly go together. We find among the stench-bearing carnivores, just as among the above insects, that the bright patterns are only found on
THEORIES OF MIMICRY 559
such species as have, in their background, colors that these patterns match, to the eyes of certain other animals whose sight they need to avoid. They are found on skunks, civets, badgers, teledus, ratels, for instance, and the animal life devoured by these carnivores is said to consist largely of worms, insects and mice, most of which are pre- sumably either caught on the surface or dug out of the turf, 1. e., pro- cured on a lower level than the predator’s head. Such of this list of
r - ”
Fig. 8. FIG. 9. Fic. 8 shows that a monochrome figure will continue distinguishable, because of its continuity of color, even when largely eclipsed by interposed forms, Fic. 9 shows how much less distinguishable an animal would be in the same situation if his head, feet and tail were light colored.
Fig. 10. Fig. 11
In Fic. 10 we see simply the skunk’s reproduction of the other light-colored details which partly form the animal’s background, and partly mask his form, so that both his darks and his lights tend, as it were, to dissolve their partnership and ally them- selves to their counterparts in the surroundings.
Fic. 11. Here we see a skunk whose patterns are experiencing exactly the same over-darkening as that of the right-hand butterfly in Fig. 6. This sketch and that of the butterfly illustrate one of the greatest uses of pattern in forest species in combatting the silhouetting propensity universal to animals observed in a dim forest illumination against lighter regions beyond them.
victims as can see would certainly have much more chance to escape, were not what would be a dark-looming predator’s head converted, by its white sky-counterfeiting, into a deceptive imitation of mere sky. Now let us see whether such stench-gland bearers as hunt in a bolder way wear the white “badges.” We find at once that minks, martens and most weasels, though well-armed with the same glands, have no top- white, and, instead of hunting along the earth’s surface or putting
560 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY
merely their heads into holes for their prey, go boldly under ground and attack such prey as hares and marmots, or fasten upon fowls much larger than they themselves. From all such prey their foreheads have nothing to gain by being white, since in the hole all is dark, and in the case of these large victims attacked above ground, the attacker, if it be a weasel, is looked down at, not seen against the sky, while the mar-
Fic. 12 shows the animal’s white top performing its perhaps cardinal function, viz., that of effacing his top contour against the sky to the eyes of inhabitants of the turf.
This is the only function of the skunk’s white top that is practically unceasing as long as the animal is above ground. We have already seen that his white and black cause each other, especially at night, to fade from sight at a short distance, and even at a near view, confuse themselves with forest details. But the obliterating power of night itself largely suffices to render all devices for concealment unnecessary, The great development of the ears of nocturnal animals attests their difficulty in seeing at this time. On the other hand, the night is scarcely ever so dark but that a solid form within a foot of one’s eye would show dark against the sky or the light parts of the forest ceiling, and surely this must be the reason why skunks and the other grubbers of small surface life wear this wonderful counterfeit of sky on their foreheads. By its aid, they must constantly come close to many kinds of small surface-life on which they so largely feed, which would evade them if they could see them. This must be espe- cially obvious to any one who has often tried in vain to creep within catching-distance of grass-hoppers. A single night’s out-of-door experimenting will convince students of the importance of the white top to such an animal as a skunk.*
tens, arboreal, acrobatic, swift and bloodthirsty, catch doubtless much after the bold manner of the small weasels, and obviously would not seem to have so much use for concealment from any particular view- point. The pine marten, however, is enough light-foreheaded to save his head from too much silhouetting in his above-ground forest operations against small terrestrial life.
In tall grass, to catch small terrestrial prey like mice, cats creep low, and fling themselves high in air, dropping flat outspread upon the dazed victim. Foxes vary this by coming down head-first upon it. In neither case would top-white help them—and they haven’t: it.
THEORIES OF MIMICRY 561
The one thing which all these sting and stink bearers have con- stantly and in common, with perhaps no exception, even including the dogs and hyenas which have also anal glands (cats lack such glands and also lack the habit of digging) is this: In pursuit of food, or in storing it, they all either go bodily into holes, as bees and wasps into flowers and fruit cavities, or ants into their galleries, and as do the weasel family after burrowing mammals, or like the grubbing species above mentioned, and foxes, stick their heads into holes for similar purposes. In all these cases these rear-armed species have a common need to be so armed, being totally helpless to defend themselves while thus im- mersed. Of all animal adaptations this stink apparatus was the thing most to be expected in a part of the animal so entirely defenseless.
Picture a bee deep in a flower, or a badger with his head jammed deep in a mouse hole—what a chance for his enemy! But these hind ends have taken care of themselves. Now notice the thing that seems to bring final ridicule on the “ badge” theory. Take, for instance, the grison, Patagonian weasel, bridled weasel, the badgers and the skunk, species whose white pattern is worn upon the head (the skunk’s tail is normally a mixture of black and white hairs—like a gray cloud) ; the moment when these animals most need to advertise the offensiveness of their armament would be when they were most defenseless, and this is, of course, when their heads are in holes, and at such a moment their “badges,” being on their heads, are concealed! The apparent reason for the white patterns’ extending so often along the back nearly to the tail is very simple. The act of digging or of stepping down into a hole tends to bring the fore part of an animal lower than his rear, and this, to eyes upon the turf, brings the whole of his back against the sky, and an erect white tail (like the upturned plumes of the egret) additionally blends the wearer into the sky.
To realize how inevitable was the development of special rear pro- tectors a man has only to conceive what an anxious sensation he him- self would experience if in a jungle he had to spend much time with his head_down a hole, and the rest of his body a tempting bait for tigers. In fine, we find upon certain species of carnivora that we know to be more or less scavengers and catchers of small fry such as require rather to be picked up than stalked or chased, and on others that we suspect of having the same habit, the same sky-picturing patterns that, from the eye-level of their prey, efface the top contours of most other slow walking feeders-on-small-life, in all branches of the animal king- dom. We find, on the other hand, a large number of Mustelide, as well as a number of other carnivora, well armed with stink-glands, but, as if because of not feeding in the same manner, entirely without top- white patterns.
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Among the genera that move erect without crouching in the vicinity of their prey, and catch it upon surfaces below their level, and which are commonly effaced as to their top contours, by white in their costume, are herons, cranes, pelicans and the omnivorous swans, geese and ducks, And a similar use of white effaces the rear view of an immense number of widely separated members of the animal kingdom which tend to be seen by their pursuers against the sky. Among these are hares, deer and antelopes, ground-nesting birds that commonly spring on wing from the nest on being flushed, such as waders, ducks and geese, many passerines, and such hawks as nest on the ground. These all wear some white rump or tail pattern, which obliterates them in the most magical way, against the sky, exactly while, in getting under way, they are for a fateful instant within springing reach of the cougar, lynx or fox that, with head close to the ground, has crept up to them. White patterns abound on aerial passerines in general, but even white wing bars are lacking from such as keep so close to the ground that no enemy sees them against the sky. And among small rodents none has top-white unless, like the jerboa, he jumps high enough to be seen by his pur- suer against the sky.
Now, while these white top patterns seem to be universally employed wherever they can be of the above service, on the other hand, they are conspicuously lacking from the rears of such ground-nesters as habitu- ally run, instead of flying from the nest, and thereby avoid showing against the sky, to terrestrial eyes. Such are gallinaceous birds, tina- mou, rails and many other sedge-haunting species. (Gallinules whose upturned tails present, as they fly, a white sky-picture, probably keep their tails down when they slink from their nest. )
The white patterns on the breasts of several kinds of bear, which Mr. Pocock has classed as warning colors, serve perfectly the same obliterative purpose that we find in all the rest of upward-facing white patterns. (These patterns face upward when the bear stands erect, 1. ¢., face upward to the degree necessary for catching top light.) Now, we find that for recognition a monochrome silhouette, especially in a thicket, is far superior to a patterned one (see Fig. 8), and also we have small grounds for thinking that such bears, when standing erect in the jungle, have need to be afraid of being attacked by mistake by any of their neighbors that would avoid them if they recognized them. On the other hand, be the bear’s object, in thus assuming man’s attitude, either aggression or defense, he gets the same general advantage out of escap- ing detection, and the chance of enjoying this boon is, as we now realize, greatly increased by the chance of this light patch being, at the right moment, just sufficiently illuminated to pass for a sky-hole through the dark mass of shrubbery of which the erect bear forms the dark center. All woodsmen know that when one has followed with the eye some bird
THEORIES OF
MIMICRY 563 or arboreal beast, and lost it in the trees, the eye searches every mass of foliage silhouetted against the sky, scarcely counting on discerning the creature’s outline, so much as on noting some mass of unbroken dark— dark without any sky-hole through it—sufficiently extensive to contain the animal itself. Into this mass, if one wish to kill the animal, one shoots, at a venture, and very often with success. In such cases, a single white mark on the concealed animal has a great chance of showing through the foliage, and saving the creature’s life by passing for sky, making the hunter think he can see through the clump as if there were no opaque animal in it.
This wonderful universal function of top-white will only begin to have vitality in the minds of students of natural history, when they begin to take the trouble to spend hours, lying flat on the ground, studying terrestrial life from the true point of view. They will at last realize that the terms “ cryptic” and “ conspicuous” can refer only to the relation of objects to their background, and that a hare is as con- spicuous, dark outlined against the sky, to the little mouse at his side, as the white heron looked at on the ground by man; while to the mouse, this same heron, now seen against the sky, is the perfection of pro- cryptic coloration, just as is the hare seen from the level of a man’s or hawk’s eyes.
There is one more point that particularly bears on the skunk matter. There is not, through all his range, any mammal, unless one counts the porcupine (an animal to resemble which would be a protection) with which any other creature could possibly confuse him, except when he is very dimly seen, either by virtue of darkness or of interposed forms, and in either of these situations, as this article has shown, the light pattern only diminishes his recognizability. Do we not, in fact, forget the evidence that the wild animals know each other by far more subtile means than we might suppose? The dog, even after all these centuries of domestication, still keeps the power to recognize his master, not merely by his scent, but by his foot-fall, when he can not see him. And the kind of faculty implied by this is even strong in the wild races of man.
Many naturalists think that such circumstances in the life of a race as are of only occasional occurrence have no part in its evolution. His- tory seems to demonstrate the opposite. It is the stresses that are formative, and are the weeders-out of weak elements. The men of a vil- lage, regardless, for instance, of whether all of them could swim, might go yearly all summer to their meadows, and all come home at night, till once when some sudden deluge swept their valley, only the strong swim- mers would escape, and thenceforth that village would comprise only strong swimmers. How often do we hear some one tell of a small and half forgotten faculty having saved his life. This seems equally to
564 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY apply to the evolution of all animals. Their races are, in the long run, subject to great fluctuation of prosperity, many of them coming, oc- casionglly, near to extermination in some part of their range. This, according to universal belief, is oftenest through famine, and in that case, plainly, those individuals best able to accommodate them- selves to new food, and to new methods of procuring it, would be most apt to survive. For this reason it does not signify whether badgers, etc., eat a larger or a smaller proportion of seeing food, since those individ- uals best fitted to catch it will ultimately constitute the race, because, while a white-topped animal would be no worse than a plain one at eat- ing turnips, he would excel him at catching mice and crickets when turnips chanced to fail; and, as this article shows, his white does not in any way increase his conspicuousness.*
Patterns of animals are like scars of ordeals, recording what their wearers have been through. Those hares and antelopes and deer which, by virtue of a white sky-imitation on their rears, were not too fatally good a target against the night sky for the stalking feline that flushed them, have survived to propagate their race. The same record of how they escaped the eyes of prey or enemy is found on the costumes of most of the animal kingdom.
Let us try to get a vivid view of the whole field of the world’s ani- mals ; over the whole earth, all species, of all orders (that ever prey or are preyed on), wear, regardless of all possible needs of badge or mimicry, such colors, and nothing but such colors, as are to be found in certain of their backgrounds. Nothing but failure to perceive this broad fact has made it possible for all these rootless theories to gain a foothold. The two most recent theories, Professor Gadow’s, and that of several experimenters, that humidity is the cause of patterns, both these are invalidated by the same general arguments. Dr. Gadow, who believes that it is shadows flickering over a lizard’s back that cause his patterns, ignores the unmistakable fact that lizards, like all other terrestrial species, are colored and patterned to match the ground on which they live, no matter whether there be vegetation over head to cast shadows, or, as on sea-beaches and bare rocks, nothing but air and sunlight. The humidity theory has the same defect. It believes that the increased richness in the colors of a species as one traces it from the arid part of its habitat to such a region as the moist-aired gulf-state forests, arises from the increased humidity, not noticing that with the increase of
*This applies to all such cases as the objection that seated butterflies are apt to have their wings closed, and therefore need no concealment-colors on their upper sides, and that flamingoes seldom prey on animal food that can see, and therefore have little need to match the sky against which they loom. The
butterfly’s fitness for opening his wings in safety, when he needs to do so, and the flamingo’s, for eating seeing-food when he must, are distinct advantages.
THEORIES OF MIMICRY 565
humidity goes always a corresponding enriching of the vegetation which forms the species’ background. Let these investigators push through the mangroves that border this sultry aired forest against the bare sands of the gulf, and they will find, two steps out upon the beach, in a saturated ocean atmosphere, a beach and ocean fauna of the purest beach and ocean colors, palest gray and pearl.
Black-and-gold is as truly the background color of the flower haunt- ing black-and-gold wasp, as is stone-weed-and-sand color of the stone- and-weed-and-sand colored sandpiper. Scarlet and yellow fruit colors, sky-blue and green leaf colors, on the macaw, are as absolutely the pic- ture of this bird’s background while he is dangerously absorbed in feed- ing in a tropical fruit tree, as is the little terresttial mammal’s brown the picture of the universal earth-brown on which he lives. The thou- sands of species of open ocean fish, the bare sand-dwellers and the ocean-air-fliers, all wear only the colors that characterize their back- grounds, often adding for the breeding season bits of the scenery of their nesting place, as in the case of puffins, whose gaudy breeding-season- bill on guard at the mouth of the burrow, obliterates the dark hole itself, and at the same time substitutes a semblance of flowers to com- plete the deception. The moment these domestic duties are over, and the puffin back in the open sea, we behold him dressed again in the universal ocean-and-rock colors of his habitat. (To show that no physiological difficulty prohibits fish, for instance, from wearing gaudy colors, we find such colors upon them wherever they live amidst bril- liant corals and brilliant water-plants. )
To complete the above argument, notice that, as my illustrations show, it is in the midst of vegetation, or other confusing and more or less eclipsing surroundings, that monochrome is far the best costume for identification, while out in the open spaces, the air, the beach, and the sea, there, where no twigs or other forest details threaten to confuse the identity of pattern, striking devices of all kinds would have their fullest chance to effect the identification for which they have been supposed to exist. And what do we find? We find nature foregoing, from end to end of the world, every chance to make use of this obvious opportunity.
Furthermore, to show that it is not a matter of regions, notice, as I have pointed out, the gilded wasps living within a few feet of earth- colored ants, and little earth-colored rodents swarming on the brown forest floor, two feet below bright dressed inhabitants of the bright dressed overhanging foliage. Why do not these rodents, forever preyed upon, in fact the stand-by diet of carnivora in every order, why do they not develop unpalatability and badges? All attainable unpalatability they must possess, after their immeasurable period of being picked from, but why not the badges? The truth appears to be that all advantageous attributes have, in every animal, grown side by side, and that the cul-
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minations, for instance, of concealing coloration, such as the trans- parency of a group of the supposed mimetics, have gone on, in this group, hand-in-hand with that of unpalatability. Now that we see that all procryptic coloration (except, of course, the facsimile kind, such as that of geometers) produces its effect by making the observer seem to see through the place where the colors are, it follows that actual trans- parency, as in these “ mimetics,” must, in ever so many situations, be wonderfully potent for obliteration. It is, of course, the only scheme for succeeding equally against both the light and the shadow, tending both to escape showing light against dark backgrounds and dark against light ones. Here aye Batgs’s own-remarks about the degree of con- spicuousness of a tfansparent butterfly. In “A Naturalist on the Amazons,” on page 39, he writes:
Some have wings transparent as glass; one of these clear-wings is especially beautiful, namely, the Hetaera Esmeralda; it has one spot only of opaque coloring on its wings, which is of a violet and rose hue; this is the only part visible when the insect is flying low over dead leaves, in the gloomy shades where alone it is found, and it there looks like the wandering petal of a flower.’
As a few hours’ experimenting in obliteration by juxtaposition of patterns will prove to any student, the optical laws which govern it are so absolute that one is not surprised to find that the whole world’s butterflies have scarcely three different schemes of pattern. The prin- ciple of pattern arrangement in these famous “ mimetic ” groups (shown in Fig. 6) is out and away the predominant one over the whole globe. If this is the case, is it strange that in each most swarmingly populated seat of butterfly life there prove to be a number of species which, living in the very same station, and with seemingly identical habits, have, in obedience to this great pattern-law, practically identical patterns and form? We see in the ocean, for instance, even mammals wearing the shape and color of fishes ?
The question, now, is, at most, merely why they have the same sta- tion and habits.
Let us dwell a moment upon the significance of this finding of the greatest cryptic coloration in the very midst of the so-called mimetics. First we must remember that all men agree that it is only persecution that can have engendered any form at all of protection. It is, as I have said, inconceivable that any forever preyed-on and picked-from race should not have acquired all possible unpalatability. And it is equally inconceivable that any race that either preys or is preyed on should not during the same periods have become, also, as nearly as possible either invisible, or at least unrecognizable as any form of animal life. Such a boon incomparably surpasses any advantage from passing for some other at the best not wholly inedible animal. Therefore one would
5'The deepest forest shades seem to be, everywhere, the typical home of these transparent species. In Trinidad they bear a popular name that alludes to this characteristic.
THEORIES OF MIMICRY 567 have expected to find all species of the classes above referred to proving to be by one means or another at the minimum of recognizability as animals, and at the same time, at a corresponding minimum of palata- pility; and behold, that is just what we find! We find in the very ranks of the supposed mimetics (a term which asserts a protection in- volving conspicuousness of the protected individual) the actual climax of invisibility, as Bates practically testifies in the above extract, and as I too, and all others who have studied these insects in their homes, must testify. (In deep forest shades the actual illumination is faint, and objects show most when they come between the beholder and regions of more lighted foliage beyond or up nearer the forest’s top. In these cir- cumstances all rank patterns are potent to thwart the revealing-power of silhouette, and behold, here we find the very prince of silhouette- thwarters—transparency itself!)
As to the impression that “ flaunting flight” (7. e., slow or weak flight), gaudy costume and unpalatability keep together, they do not do this to any very impressive degree, as the accompanying table will re- mind the student. [ntomologists will see that this table is sufficiently correct for my purpose.
ACME OF RESPECTIVE TRAITS
Of Strength | Of Gaudiness ' | Of Dulness of Of Alleged and Speed of | of Costume. Of Slowness. Costume. Uppalatability. Fhght, | | ) Morpho. | Morpho. Heliconius. | The whole Heliconius. Papilio. | Papilo. | ‘**mimetic’’ group The whole | Heliconius. | proper. ‘“mimetic” group.
In fact, one finds, as one would have expected, that every butterfly has the gait best suited to the kind of place that he lives in. Heliconius, one of the very slowest genera on our continent, is particularly at home while flying through the densest copses. It is perfectly natural that such a butterfly as a grapta, matched to the colors of the ground, should hurry, in flying from one safe spot on the ground to another, but the case of Heliconius is very different. He lives in cover, the very kind of cover to which small birds fly from a hawk, and through this he sails and flits in the only conceivable manner, threading its minute alleys with short wing beats, and at times almost seeming to stop and crawl through the narrowest places. This is, at least, true of charitonius, sara and melpomene, in the West Indies and Trinidad, where I have seen them. As is characteristic of all nature, these insects overflow from the situations that most nurture them into less favorable places.
Yet it is almost a sufficient answer to the natural question why they are not there preyed upon, to point out afresh that on the American continent, at least, no kind of butterfly at all appears often to be at- tacked on the wing. In Trinidad, one of the keenest of that remark-
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able family of born naturalists, the Carrs, told me that he had never seen a bird catch a butterfly, and this has almost or quite been my ex- perience too. In Trinidad, for instance, one may see flycatchers catching slow fliers like beetles, by the hour, any day, but never see them pay the slightest attention to any butterfly whatever. I reiterate this here, merely for what it is worth, and am nowise averse to believing that Heliconius is more than ordinarily unpalatable. If it be true that feeding among red or orange flowers has now or formerly so predomi- nated in the life of the red and yellow spotted species, as to make this dress do them more good than harm, it is equally logical that, as in the case of the digging and burrowing animals that I have referred to, with their corresponding rear armaments, butterflies particularly subject to dangerous absorption while feeding, should have been in the whole period of their existence bred to an excessive degree of inedibility. Ags to the flight of such butterflies as on the one hand, papilios and mor- phos, and on the other, the “ mimetic” groups proper, the former two families comprise between them, the strongest and swiftest of Ameri- can butterfly flight, and an unsurpassed brilliancy of costume, bright colors not proving, in their case, to be accompanied either by slow flight, or by equally notable unpalatability. On the other hand, the American so-called mimetic groups proper have a middle-class flight apparently well suited to the by no means open under-brush of the forest, where they go about much in the manner of the genus Hip- parchia in the north.
Now to glance for a moment at the significance ascribed by ento- mologists to the injuries which are found along the borders of butter- flies’ wings.
Perhaps the most highly artificial and strained hypothesis that has been released from duty by the discovery of the use of patterns is the conception that after a million years’ experience birds would not inevitably know what part of a butterfly is edible and instinctively seek it, rather than try to eat the tissue-paper pictures of background painted along its wing-borders. This is entirely contrary to the stern rectitude of nature. One might as well hope to fool a ship about her center of gravity, and induce her to float at an angle that did not defer to it, as induce a million-year-long race of eaters of butterflies’ bodies to waste energy over these patterns.
A butterfly has, of course, a fairly tough body, and wings that begin tough next to the body, but become mere tissue-paper at the lateral borders. Now, every slightest contact is perilous to the entirety of these borders, and, at the same time every circumstance of the butter- fly’s life threatens contact to them. Even the wind may blow things against them, and when the butterfly is pursued by an aerial enemy, his own efforts to escape must often bring them into collision with vegetation. Again, if the pursuer be a bird, his swoops bring him into
THEORIES OF MIMICRY 569
almost inevitable collision with these outstretched wing-borders. To lunge at a thing and miss it is inevitably to be carried on, the next in- stant, close past it. ‘To put it from the insect’s point of view, barely to dodge an onrushing foe, is, as we all know, to have him almost inevitably brush against us, to say the least, as his impetus carries him forward. It would be absurd to doubt the very great likelihood of mutilation to the butterfly’s wing-borders at such a moment. Again; a bird struggling, against difficulties, to seize such a thing as a zigzag- ging butterfly, inevitably tries for the mass of the target, the most visible part. Now, although the wings do, certainly, more or less wag the body up and down, nevertheless the body is the axis of the mill- wheel of which the wing-borders are the floats, so that even if the bird tried for the body, unless the attack came exactly from behind, the flapping wings would tend to protect it by constantly getting in the way of the bird’s beak, but this would be at the expense of these delicate fabrics, which would smash themselves against it. So much for the immensely greater risk of every sort to this delicate border than to the body itself.
Now as to the supposition that birds prefer to seize this border region, rather than the body. One simple fact suffices to show us that we have not the slightest evidence that they do so. It is this. A but- terfly seized by his body can not escape (unless, of course, he chance to be cut nearly through by the beak that seized him) while one seized by the wing-border is no more detained by being thus seized than by re- ceiving at this point any of the merely accidental injuries above re- ferred to. Now if a butterfly seized by the body, is generally eaten, while on the other hand every butterfly injured as to its border, escapes, what possible significance has our finding, as we do, mainly border injuries ?
Now, although it seems scarcely necessary to finish the argument, to consider for a moment the supposed selection by the bird, of special points along these borders, the reader has been sufficiently reminded how very far the bird is, in one of these chases, from being in a position to select a point of attack.
We find that the whole subject of animals’ coloration has been handled with very loose thinking, as if the old time disrespect of natural history still haunted men’s minds and dissuaded them from real study. This cloud that enveloped natural history in former centuries has been steadily thinning, but it is certainly accountable for many loosenesses even up to the present time.
For instance, it is perfectly plain to-day that nature would not ask a coral snake to get along. with a costume which, while it often served to warn off his enemies, proved, at other times, a disadvantage to him by identifying him to the animals which he wished to eat. The writings upon these subjects, down to the present day, teem with just this kind
VoL. LXxv.—38.
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of weakness. Also, being falsely based, they have needed props and dikes at one point after another, and these have naturally proved to be out of harmony with each other. Here it has been assumed that ani- mals need badges for mutual recognition, and there, as in the “ mimetic ” groups, a theory has obtained which assumed that they need nothing of the kind. Individuals of each species of these groups have been ex- pected to know each other amidst a crowd of close imitations (and doubtless they could do so).
The much insisted upon significance of the superficiality of the resemblances among the “ mimetic” groups vanishes upon our discov- ery of a full blown use, of the most direct and primitive character, for all these colorations. From that moment, these resemblant costumes are seen to be, as I have pointed out, on one basis with the many other resemblances among species of widely different origin that have long enough had the same habits and environment. All these, and they are to be found in many orders of the animal kingdom, are only superficial resemblances, yet it is perfectly plain that they have been acquired for ause. The proof that they are only superficial is that the anatomist can discover the real pedigree of the disguised species by an examination of the elements of its structure. Good examples of this fact are the whales and seals, with their hind legs more or less arranged into a fish- tail, yet perfectly recognizable by the zoologist. (I assume the truth of natural selection.)
In fine to imagine that the forest population, living side by side, in perpetual need of knowing each other, would be in any way helped by badges, is as if some person, newly arrived in a long-established com- munity, supposed, because he could only distinguish its members by prominent superficial marks, the red hair of one, the pock marks of another, etc., that this was how the members themselves knew each other, after lifelong familiarity.
The truth, however, is, that were he to cite these distinguishing marks, in speaking of one member to another, he would find that the mutual familiarity of these members had become so subtile, had, so to speak, sunk in so deep, that they had almost forgotten the existence of such marks at all, except where men’s names commemorated these.
Lifelong members of a community, all reacting upon each other in a hundred ways, know each other by innumerable means, all communi- cating with their subliminal consciousness. To this consciousness, the movements, for instance, of a mink in the bushes, probably announce his identity to all his neighbors, who hear him, just as plainly as if they saw him, and the least glimpse of him would, upon the same principle, be as good as a full view. Habitual woodsmen generally tend to believe this, because of finding that they themselves tend to this intuitive method of identifying their wild neighbors in the forest.
WHAT PRAGMATISM IS
WHAT PRAGMATISM IS, AS I UNDERSTAND IT
By THOMAS MITCHELL SHACKLEFORD
TALLAHASSEE, FLORIDA
NE who undertakes to tell what pragmatism is has a hard task to
perform. Before he gets through with it, he may find himself
in a like plight with old Kaspar in trying to tell his grandchildren of
the battle of Blenheim. You will remember that in response to little
Peterkin’s request, “ Now tell us what *twas all about,” and to his
question, “ And what good came of it at last?” Kaspar could only declare “That ’twas a famous victory.”
To begin with, not only has no history of the origin, rise and spread of pragmatism yet been written, but no full, complete, sys- tematic statement of what it really is, what it does and what it may be expected to do is to be found anywhere. A systematic exposition of this “new philosophy ” remains an unfulfilled want. We can not be said to have anything like an adequate treatise. Dr. Schiller’s “Humanism” and “ Studies in Humanism” consist of a number of detached essays, largely controversial in character, written at different times between the years 1892 and 1907, on various occasions and for special purposes. Professor Dewey’s “Studies in Logical Theory ” also consists of detached essays from himself and seven of his co-workers, and Professor James’s “ Pragmatism” is made up of eight popular lectures, published in the same form in which they were delivered, without notes and without revision. All of these are most excellent books, well written, entertaining and bearing directly upon the new philosophical movement, only they are not, and do not pretend to be, what most of the critics seem to have rather hastily assumed—full or complete expositions or treatises. Much other literature upon the subject may be found scattered through the various philosophical periodicals. In fact, so voluminous has this literature grown of late years and the movement has evoked so much hostile criticism, that the uninformed reader would be justifiable in thinking “ pragmatism a complete system set forth for centuries in hundreds of ponderous volumes.”
However, for all practical purposes, it still remains as true as in 1905, when Professor James wrote concerning the movement:
It suffers badly at present from incomplete definition. Its most systematic advocates, Schiller and Dewey, have published fragmentary programs only.
So, a few months later, an able and somewhat sympathetic reviewer complained :
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Its defenders have not come before the world with a ready-made and fully- developed doctrine, thought out into all its consequences and tested in all its applications. It is just the tentative and provisional nature ef many exposi- tions of pragmatism which makes it hard to grasp its meaning unequivocally, It seems to change Proteus-like, under our hands, just when we think we have held it fast and pinned it down. The very formulations of its doctrines are perplexingly numerous, and not always, on the face of them, consistent with each other.
There is undoubtedly some truth in this accusation, but the reason why such a condition exists is not far to seek.
It is well known to all who have ever attempted to make them that definitions and rules in any science or branch of study are always exceedingly difficult to frame. Though studied first by the student, they are necessarily formulated last. Dr. Schiller says:
Real definitions are a standing difficulty for all who have to deal with them, whether as logicians or as scientists. . . . For a real definition, to be ade- quate, really involves a complete knowledge of the thing defined. And of what subject of scientific interest can we flatter ourselves to have complete knowledge?
Only a moment’s reflection will convince us that this is true. Definitions must necessarily delimit and restrict, consequently with the growth of knowledge they become insufficient and obsolete. The discovery of one new fact may invalidate and completely overthrow a definition that may have passed current and remained unchallenged for years. In other words, “ new facts burst old rules ” and definitions, both are man-made products, so it should never be forgotten that definitions and “rules are made for man, not man for rules” and definitions. No science is finished, none can be called exact, all are in the process of formation. To illustrate. Who can define matter, or ether, or electricity? Of how much value now are many of the definitions in physics or chemistry of ten, or even five, years ago? All definitions, then, at least along scientific lines or in any living, growing branch of study, should be regarded as provisional only, true only up to date, and, like railroad schedules, subject to change without notice to the public. They should be treated as useful working tools, but liable any day to be superseded by better instruments. All this applies with especial force to a “new philosophy,” still in the em- bryonic or chrysalis state. Since “the pragmatic movement,—so- called,” according to Professor James, “seems to have rather suddenly precipitated itself out of the air,” it ought not to be a matter of sur- prise that there is not entire agreement even among the pragmatists themselves. It would be an easy task to set forth various points of difference, as well as apparent, if not real, contradictions, among those who have grasped their pens, even if they can not be said to have drawn their swords, and hastened to do battle in its defense. In doing this, however, we should only be following in the wake of the
a em vs
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WHAT PRAGMATISM IS 573
hostile critics who have emphasized these points to the exclusion of any real merits which the movement may possess.
We all remember what Emerson said long ago about ideas an- nouncing truth being in the air, seeking to gain entrance to different minds in different parts of the world at the same time, and “ the most impressionable brain will announce it first, but all will announce it a few minutes later.” But it is not to be expected that all minds will be impressed in the same way or to a like degree, or that all would have equal power of utterance. So we are further told by Professor James:
A number of tendencies that have always existed in philosophy have all at once become conscious of themselves collectively, and of their combined mission; and this has occurred in so many countries, and from so many dif- ferent points of view, that much unconcerted statement has resulted.
Before the movement was fairly launched, or an opportunity had been afforded its leaders of getting together and comparing notes as to their common message and unifying it, if possible, the critics had attacked it on all sides and from every quarter. This caused a rush of both friends and foes, professionals and tenderfeet, to this newly discovered philosophical Klondike, which has been productive of much confusion and misunderstanding. Reconciling these conflicting state- ments is simply out of the question, and I shall not attempt the impossible.
Disclaiming right at the outset all intention of speaking as one clothed with authority, fully realizing that what I may say is binding upon no one, my mission is simply to set forth what pragmatism is, as I understand it. Even this I venture upon with diffidence. As an excuse for my seeming rashness, if such be needed, I would repeat what the protagonist of pragmatism himself has said :
Whoever will contribute any touch of sharpness will help us to make sure of what’s what and who is who. Any one can contribute such a definition, and, without it, no one knows exactly where he stands.
My purpose, however, is not to add another to the many existing definitions, but rather to weigh and compare some of those already current. In other words, I merely propose to examine the history of the movement with the intention of ascertaining, if possible, what pragmatism is, and I shall throw this layman’s contribution into the bubbling vat of publicity where, jostled by rivals and torn by critics, it will eventually either disappear from notice, or else, if better luck befall it, quietly subside to the profundities, and serve as possible ferment of new growths or a nucleus of new crystallizations.
It is easy enough to tell of the origin of the word and that it is “derived from the same Greek word zpdyya, meaning action, from which our words ‘practise’ and ‘ practical’ come.” Now this not only does not tell us much, but has actually proved misleading and is
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responsible for some of the current misunderstandings. But it is too
late now to rectify this most unfortunate selection of a name. It has
been married to the movement for so many years that they must be
taken together “for better for worse.” As Dr. Schiller has well said: The name in this case does even less than usual to explain the meaning. Elsewhere he has said:
In the end we never find out “ what a thing really is” by asking “ what it was in the beginning.” . . . The true nature of a thing is to be found in its validity, which, however, must be connected rather than contrasted with its origin. ‘“ What a thing really is” appears from what it does, and so we must study its whole career. We study its past to foretell its future, and to find out what it is really “ driving at.”
The first person to use the word pragmatism in print was Professor James, in his California address in 1898, wherein he sets forth the principle as follows, with the prefatory statement that
it may be expressed in a variety of ways, all of them very simple: The soul and meaning of thought can never be made to direct itself towards any- thing but the production of belief, belief being the demicadence which closes a musical phrase in the symphony of our intellectual life. Thought in movement has thus for its only possible motive the attainment of thought at rest. But when our thought about an object has found its rest in belief, then our action on the subject can firmly and safely begin. Beliefs, in short, are really rules for action; and the whole function in thinking is but one step in the production of habits of action. If there were any part of a thought that made no difference in the thought’s practical consequences, then that part would be no proper element of the thought’s significance. Thus the same thought may be’clad in different words; but if the different words suggest no different conduct, they are mere outer accretions, and have part in the thought’s meaning. If, however, they determine conduct differently, they are essential elements of the significance. “Please open the door,” and “veuillez ouvrir la porte,” in French, mean just the same thing; but “ D—n you, open the door,” although in English, means something very different. Thus to develop a thought’s meaning we need only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce; that conduct is for us its sole significance. And the tangible fact at the root of all our thought-distinctions, however subtle, is that there is no one of them so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practise. To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, then, we need only consider what effects of a conceivably practical kind the object may involve—what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare. Our conception of these effects, then, is for us the whole of our conception of the object, so far as that conception has positive significance at all.
He goes on to say:
This is the principle of Peirce, the principle of pragmatism. I think myself that it should be expressed more broadly than Mr. Peirce expresses it. The ultimate test for us of what a truth means is indeed the conduct it dictates or inspires. But it inspires that conduct because it first foretells some particular turn to our experience which shall call for just that conduct from us. And I should prefer for our purposes this evening to express Peirce’s principle by saying that the effective meaning of any philosophic proposition can always be brought down to.some particular consequence, in our future practical experience, whether
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WHAT PRAGMATISM IS 575
active or passive; the point lying rather in the fact that the experience must be particular, than in the fact that it must be active.
All this seems to be perfectly plain and simple, but, in view of the misunderstandings that are still current concerning the principle, due largely to flagrant, if not wilful misrepresentations, and as this is the beginning point of the “new philosophy,” I trust that you will pardon still further extracts. The gifted lecturer tells us that “to take in the importance of this principle, one must get accustomed to applying it to concrete cases,” and the entire address is devoted to such applications along religious and philosophical lines. He says:
This is one of its first consequences. Suppose there are two different philosophical definitions, or propositions, or maxims, or what not, which seem to contradict each other, and about which men dispute. If, by supposing the truth of the one, you can see no conceivable practical consequences to anybody at any time or place, which is different from what you would foresee if you supposed the truth of the other, why then the difference between the two propositions is no difference,—it is only a specious and verbal difference, un- worthy of further contention. Both formulas mean radically the same thing, although they may.say it in such different words. It is astonishing to see how many philosophical disputes collapse into insignificance the moment you subject them to this simple test. There can be no difference which doesn’t make a difference—no difference in abstract truth which does not express itself in a difference of concrete fact, and of conduct consequent upon the fact, imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere, and somewhen.
After stating that “it is the English-speaking philosophers who first introduced the custom of interpreting the meaning of conceptions by asking what difference they make for life,” he adds:
Mr. Peirce has only expressed in the form of an explicit maxim what their sense for reality led them all instinctively to do. The great English way of investigating a conception is to ask yourself right off, What is it known as? In what facts does it result? What is its cash-value, in terms of particular experience? And what special difference would come into the world according as it were true or false?
Finally, he says:
For what seriousness can possibly remain in debating philosophic proposi- tions that will never make an appreciable difference to us in action? And what matters it, when all propositions are practically meaningless, which of them be called true or false? .
Expressed in these different ways but all meaning the same thing, it would seem that Dr. Schiller was right in saying that the principle ought to be regarded as the greatest truism, if it had not pleased intellectualists to take it as the greatest paradox.
After all that has been written on the subject, a writer has quite recently said :
Ninety-five per cent., and a little more, of all who have rallied so valiantly to the pragmatic banner totally misunderstand the new philosophy. And it is even nearer the truth to say that one hundred per cent. of all the critics who
to their own satisfaction have completely demolished the pragmatic structure have fired their shots at the wrong target.
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Even if this contains only a half-truth, it behooves us to try to get our bearings, although philosophical orientation be fraught with all the difficulties that have been claimed. In any event, it is of the utmost importance to get the right point of beginning, so I have thought it advisable to set forth Professor James’s exact words when he first announced the principle.
So far as I have been able to discover, the next time he announced it was in his “ Varieties of Religious Experience,’ where he con- densed it. I quote only one sentence:
To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, we need then only consider what sensations, immediate or remote, we are conceivably to
expect from it, and what conduct we must prepare in case the object should be true.
I should like you to note especially the added words, “ immediate or remote.” I would also call attention to the fact that none but a pragmatist could have written this truly delightful book. The eight- eenth chapter, bearing the title “Philosophy,” is simply a clearly wrought-out application of the principle in the philosophy of religion.
In Baldwin’s “ Dictionary of Philosophy,” Professor James defines the principle as follows:
The doctrine that the whole “meaning” of a conception expresses itself in practical consequences, consequences either in the shape of conduct to be recommended, or in that of experience to be expected, if the conception be true; which consequences would be different if it were untrue, and must be different from the consequences by which the meaning of other conceptions is in turn expressed. If a second conception should not appear to have other consequences, then it must really be only the first conception under a different name. In methodology it is certain that to trace and compare their respective conse- quences is an admirable way of establishing the different meanings of different definitions.
In an article entitled “ Humanism and Truth,” published in Mind for October, 1904, he says:
First, as to the word “ pragmatism.” I myself have only used the term to indicate a method of carrying on an abstract discussion. The serious mean- ing of a concept, says Mr. Peirce, lies in the concrete difference to some one which its being true will make. Strive to bring all debated conceptions to that “ pragmatic” test, and you will escape vain wrangling: if it can make no practical difference which of two statements be true, then they are really one statement in two verbal forms; if it can make no practical difference whether a statement be true or false, then the statement has no real meaning. In neither case is there anything fit to quarrel about: we may save our breadth, and pass to more important things.
All that the pragmatic method implies, then, is that truths should have practical consequences. In England the word has been used more broadly to cover the notion that the truth of any statement consists in the consequences, and particularly in their being good consequences. Here we get beyond affairs of method altogether; and since my pragmatism and this wider pragmatism are so different, and both are important enough to have different names, I think that Mr. Schiller’s proposal to call the wider pragmatism by the name
WHAT PRAGMATISM IS 577
of “Humanism” is excellent and ought to be adopted. The narrower prag- matism may still be spoken of as the “ pragmatic method.”
Before proceeding further or attempting to set forth what the movement has seemed to mean to others who have written upon the subject, whether favorably or otherwise, it may be advisable for us to pause and ask ourselves if we are certain that we understand what its brilliant protagonist means. Is the language in which he has couched it so vague, obscure, ambiguous, uncertain or contradictory as to warrant the different constructions that have been placed thereon? I ask this question advisedly, since Professor James himself, in his Pragmatism, has said:
On all hands we find the “ pragmatic movement ” spoken of, sometimes with respect, sometimes with contumely, seldom with clear understanding.
It would seem that it ought to be well worth our while to try to get at the reason for this.
It may be that in so doing we can derive some assistance from the rules applied by the courts in the interpretation and construction of constitutions, statutes, contracts, deeds, wills and other written in- struments. Some of these rules are so well settled that they are regarded as almost axiomatic and pass unquestioned. They are even applied to the construction of charges and instructions given by trial judges to juries to aid them in reaching correct verdicts in the trial of contested cases, whether human life, liberty or property is involved. If it be practicable and safe to apply them in the settlement of such vital questions, surely they may be used profitably and safely, even pragmatically, if you will, in abstract discussions along philosophical or religious lines. Of course, there are some points of difference in the application of these rules by the courts to the different kinds or classes of instruments, but such points are of minor importance and may be treated as negligible for our present purposes. In setting forth some of these cardinal rules, I shall divest them of all legal technicalities, as far as may be, and clothe them in plain, simple language.
1. When the language of a writing is plain and unequivocal, there is neither occasion nor opportunity for interpretation. When the words used admit of but one meaning, to put another upon them is not to construe or interpret a writing, but to alter it.
2. Words are presumed to be used in their plain, ordinary sense; technical terms are to be understood in their technical sense; all words are to be understood according to their meaning at the time and place of writing them.
3. The grammatical and ordinary sense of words is to be adhered to, unless that would lead to some absurdity, or some repugnance or inconsistency with the rest of the instrument, in which case the gram-
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matical and ordinary sense of the words must be modified, so as to avoid that absurdity or inconsistency, but no further.
4. In construing any part of a writing, regard should be had to the entire instrument. Other portions may throw much light upon the one under special investigation or consideration, and greatly modify the meaning which it would bear as an independent clause. Every part of a writing should be brought into action in order to collect from the whole one uniform and consistent purpose, if that is possible. Accordingly, if one construction will give reasonable effect to every part of an instrument, while another would require the rejection of a part, the former will be preferred.
These rules will probably prove sufficient for our present purposes. In order, however, to make it plain to you, perhaps, it may be well for me to give a concrete instance of their application by the courts. I shall select the giving of charges or instructions to juries. In passing upon a single instruction or charge it should be considered in connection with all the other instructions and charges bearing on the same subject, and if, when thus considered, the law appears to have been fairly and impartially presented to the jury, an assignment of error predicated upon the giving of such instruction or charge must fail, unless, under all the peculiar circumstances of the case, the appellate court is of the opinion that such instruction or charge was calculated to confuse, mislead or prejudice the jury. In determining the correctness of charges and instructions, they should be considered as a whole, and, if as a whole they are free from error, an assignment predicated on isolated paragraphs or portions, which, standing alone, might be misleading, must fail. Again, where an instruction, as far as it goes, states a correct proposition of law, but is defective because it fails to qualify or explain the proposition it lays down in con- sonance with the facts of the case, such defect is cured if subsequent instructions are given containing the required qualifications or ex- ceptions. It is not required that a single instruction should contain all the law relating to the particular subject treated therein.
I believe that these are all the legal propositions to which I wish to call your attention. I might add that the object of judicial inter- pretation of instruments is not to discover the intention of the maker or writer by the use of any and every legitimate means, but rather to take the instrument itself and determine such intention from the words used therein.
It would really seem that the rules of grammar and the laws of language would be all that we should need in order to determine what Professor James meant in the quoted passages, but even if we should apply these legal rules in all their strictness I do not believe that we should be left in any state of doubt or uncertainty. But we are not
WHAT PRAGMATISM IS 579
called upon to so narrow and restrict our investigation. It is well known that every writer of marked individuality or originality acquires a style peculiarly his own and easily recognizable. Their writings come to have a certain hall-mark, so to speak, which there is no mis- taking. It is further true that a writer, especially along philosophical or theological lines, either forms a school or system of his own, which he is likely to do if he is a genius, or else joins or connects himself with one of the already existing schools. In either case he becomes identified with certain doctrines. He presents those aspects of the truth, as he has conceived it to be, which have most strongly appealed to him and which he considers of supreme importance. Upon these he will dwell and lay special emphasis, reiterating them, presenting them from different points of view, until his readers grow to expect his utterances to be along those chosen lines and in his own individual way. In this way schools and systems are founded and followers and adherents gained. Such a writer is entitled in all fairness to have whatever he writes taken and judged in connection with his other utterance along similar lines; otherwise, in order to avoid misunder- standings, he would be forced to continually repeat himself, which would be intolerable.
Professor James has written much along both psychological and philosophical lines, and the particular doctrines which he holds are well known. His style has long been noted for its lucidity and has become both the marvel and despair of other writers. Hitherto be seems to have experienced no difficulty in making himself understood. Is it conceivable, then, that, all at once, when he began expounding the principle of pragmatism, he should have lapsed or fallen into vague and obscure expressions? In all candor, I ask you to turn back to the quoted passages, and taking them just as they are, torn from their contexts and settings, apply to them any or all of the rules and tests that I have mentioned, and then ask yourself whether or not you have any difficulty in grasping their meaning. If not, why have the critics found it so hard to understand them?
And yet, the most diverse and contradictory constructions have been placed thereon as well as upon his “ Pragmatism,” which entire book is devoted to elucidating what the principle is and wherein it may be applied. In fact, to such an extent has this prevailed that he felt impelled to write “a final brief reply” to his critics, which he en- titled “The Pragmatist Account of Truth and Its Misunderstanders ” and published in The Philosophical Review for January, 1908. It should further be borne in mind that the critics also had access to all of his other writings and were presumably familiar with them. Again I ask the pertinent question, how such a condition of affairs could exist? Making all due allowances for the imperfections and
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580 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY uncertainties of language and the limitations of human thought and understanding will not serve to explain it. It could not really have been asked or expected that the entire essence of the principle should have been compressed into one concise definition or even into one formal or rigid statement. As its protagonist himself has said in an article entitled “ Humanism and Truth Once More,” published in Mind for April, 1905:
As I apprehend the movement toward humanism, it is based on no particular discovery or principle that can be driven into one precise formula which thereupon can be impaled upon a logical skewer. It is much more like one of those secular changes that come upon public opinion over-night, as it were, borne upon tides “too full for sound or foam,” that survive all the crudities and extravagances of their advocates, that you can pin to no one absolutely essential statement, nor kill by any one decisive stab.
In the same article he says:
The one condition of understanding humanism is to become inductive- minded oneself, to drop rigorous definitions, and follow lines of least resistance “on the whole.”
It would seem that this was expecting entirely too much. He had also said in The Journal of Philosophy for March 2, 1905:
It is not a single hypothesis or theorem, and it dwells on no new facts. It is rather a slow shifting in the philosophic perspective, making things appear as from a new center of interest or point of sight. Some writers are strongly conscious of the shifting, others half unconscious, even though their own vision may have undergone much change. The result is no small confusion in debate, the half-conscious humanists taking part against the radical ones, as if they wished to count upon the other side.
I am inclined to think that its very simplicity has been the chief barrier in the way of its acceptance. ‘“ Unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto. the Greeks foolishness.” Has it not ever been so in both the philosophical and religious worlds? Would it not find more ready acceptance if it required “some great things”? Perhaps, one barrier in the way of those who have “ seriously tried to comprehend what the pragmatic movement may intelligibly mean” is mental myopia, which prevents them from assuming the proper attitude in order to gain the right point of view. They are too wedded to their idols of dogma and authority to experience that change of heart which would enable them to break the shackles which bind them to “ abso- lutistic hopes” and acquire the freedom which would permit them to enter into such “ conditions of belief.” Dr. Schiller has said:
Concerning any considerable novelty of thought the prediction may be made that hardly any one above thirty will be psychologically capable of adopting it, unless he had previously been looking for just such a solution.
Whether this be true or not, many have failed to understand it simply for the reason that they have not really tried to do so. They “have boggled at every word they could boggle at, and refused to
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WHAT PRAGMATISM IS 581 take the spirit rather than the letter” of what was said. In viola- tion of every rule of interpretation, common-sense or legal, they have ignored the context and pounced upon single words and isolated sen- tences. ‘Truly, in philosophy as elsewhere, “ none are so blind as those who will not see.” We are all familiar with “the proof-text method ” of argument, much in vogue among theological disputants some years ago, but now happily fallen into a state of “innocuous desuetude.” Surely it is not being revived in philosophy. The reasons for the attitude of this class of critics are plain. If the pragmatic method should prove to be true or valid, it would necessarily require “ much restatement of traditional notions.” If it should prevail, the existing systems of philosophy would be unsettled, if not overthrown, and many of the past, not to mention current, philosophical treatises would thereby become obsolete and subject to relegation to “ that ‘Museum of Curios’ which Professor James has so delightfully instituted for the clumsy devices of an antiquated philosophy.” Did not Demetrius, a silversmith, and his followers raise a great uproar at Ephesus against St. Paul for like reasons?
Our Harvard pragmatist has further said:
A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once for all upon a lot of inveterate habits dear te professional philosophers. He turns away from abstractions and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad @ priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power. That means the empirical temper regnant and the rationalist temper sincerely given up. It means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality, and the pretence of finality in truth. At the same time, it does not stand for any special results. It is a method only. But the general triumph of that method would mean an enormous change in what I called in my last lecture the “temperament of philosophy.” Teachers of the ultra-rationalistic type would be frozen out, much as the courtier type is
frozen out in republics, as the ultramontane type of priest is frozen out in protestant lands.
Yet once more:
No particular results then so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic method means. The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, “ categories,” supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts.
All this affords some explanation of the flutter and consternation which pragmatism has caused in the philosophic dove-cotes and why it has even been productive of ruffled feelings and bad temper. Doubt- less some felt deeply incensed that “ proud Philosophy,” that celestial goddess, long acclaimed “Scientia Scientiarum,” should be dragged down from her emyprean heights into this work-a-day world, reduced to the menial position, so to speak, of a hewer of wood and drawer of water. Surely this was desecration, if not rank sacrilege. Perhaps,
582 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY a still further explanation may be found in the fact that pragmatism undertook to act as a mediator and reconciler between the contending systems and, in consequence thereof, has suffered the proverbial fate of the peacemaker.
Whether or not I have been successful in pointing out the true causes which have induced the fierce onslaughts which have been made against the movement, it must be admitted that they have signally failed to check it, and that it is growing, in spite of all the hostile criticisms and gross misrepresentations. It would seem that it has come into the world to stay. It might well be that its critics would have fared better from the beginning if they had remembered that “good humor is a philosophic state of mind,” even if it be not true “that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile.” It un- doubtedly would have been more in unison with the true philosophic spirit, and, perhaps, attended with better results, if they had set to work in good earnest to refute the arguments advanced by Professor James and the other leaders, instead of contenting themselves with giving pragmatism a bad name and bestowing upon it abuse and oppro- brious epithets. If they were simply following the old maxim, “ give a dog a bad name and it will hang him,” they were on a false trail.
As I have said, entire harmony has not existed in pragmatist ranks, of which fact the critics have made the most. Even so, such differ- ences furnish no justification for the failure of the professional philos- ophers to understand the lucid statements of Professor James, or of the other two leaders, Dr. Schiller and Professor Dewey, as some of them seem to have done. ‘The points of divergence among them are easily discernible by those who really try to see and understand the movement.
However, pragmatism, being what its protagonist says it is, ought not to be expected to mean the same thing or to make a like appeal to different minds. Evidently, it was with deep design that Professor James began the first lecture in his “ Pragmatism” with that para- doxical quotation from Mr. Chesterton’s “ Heretics,” as to the most important thing about a man being his philosophy. It contains a greater modicum of truth than most paradoxes, for as a man’s philosophy is, so will be “his view of the universe,” and, as that view is, so will be his life. From this paradox our pragmatist proceeds to develop the thesis that “the history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments,” and to show us how temperament “loads the evidence” not only for philosophers, but for all of us. In this he follows Fichte, who has said somewhere, “ what system of philosophy you hold depends wholly upon what manner of man you are.” So Dr. Schiller has said, “ the fit of a man’s philosophy is (and ought to be) as individual as the fit of his clothes.” All this
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must naturally follow if we agree with Mr. R. R. Marett, who has said:
There is at least a half-truth at the back of the view that a man is born either a Platonist or an Aristotelian, a Stoic or an Epicurean, an intuitionist or a utilitarian, an idealist or a materialist. We are spiritually-minded or worldly-minded, believers or sceptics, romanticists or realists, and se forth, primarily at least in virtue of a certain fundamental endowment of massive sentiment.
Our “ great student of the human soul” has said, this particular difference in temperament “ has counted in literature, art, government and manners as well as in philosophy.” He should have added religion, for in no other department of life has temperament played a most important réle, as he himself has superbly exemplified in his “ Vari- eties.” This furnishes the key to the explanation of why “ God has two families of children on this earth, the once-born and the twice-born,” to use Francis W. Newman’s significant phrase. There is no escaping it. By shaping our faith for us it largely “ divides us into possibility men and anti-possibility men ” and explains why “ each of us dichotom- izes the Kosmos in a different place,” thereby each making for himself the world in which he lives. We have certain rules by which we can calculate with approximate correctness the variation of the magnetic needle from the true North and South line, but, most unfortunately, we have no rule for computing temperamental variation.
Pragmatism, therefore, being primarily a method of thought, “an attitude of orientation,” neither designates nor leads to any “ specific philosophic creed”; and is not a system or a metaphysic. Dr. Schiller has cogently said that it is “an epistemological method which really describes the facts of actual knowing.” That it should somewhat definitely point to a metaphysic and also prove to be “a genetic theory of what is meant by truth” should prove no surprise to us, but, as important as all this is, it must be considered as secondary. One of its chief beauties and attractions is that it leaves each one of us perfectly free to develop his own particular “ideals and over-beliefs, the most interesting and valuable things about a man.” Thus it has led Professor James to “radical empiricism,” Mr. Peirce to “ prag- maticism,” Professor Dewey to “instrumentalism” or “ immediate empiricism,” Dr. Schiller to “ humanism,” and others to “ the thirteen pragmatisms,” of which we have been hearing so much of late. All this is as it should be and is greatly to its credit. But these different terms should not be confounded with each other, used interchangeably as though they were synonymous, or identified with pragmatism, as has been done by some friends and many foes of the movement. At all hazards, the pragmatic method must not be permitted to become identi- fied with any one of them. That would be only the first step towards its crystallization into a creed or petrifaction into a dogma. That would be but to follow blindly in the footsteps of those teachers who
584 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY have so treated the Christian religion, thereby creating schisms, sec- tarianism, and that intolerant party spirit “which blights and cankers the truth itself.” Whatever Christianity may be now, primarily it was a method of living, a principle of life—not a creed or dogma.
For us, in this day and time, to repeat this blunder would simply be indefensible and unpardonable. However desirable unity may be, it should never be purchased at the expense of truth and freedom. Dr. Schiller says:
Two men, therefore, with different temperaments, ought not to arrive at the same metaphysic, nor can they do so honestly; each should react individually on the food for thought which his personal life affords, and the resulting differ- ences ought not to be set aside as void of ultimate significance. . . . No two men ever think (and still less feel) alike, even when they profess allegiance to the self-same formulas.
Consequently, the pragmatic method will not prevent the forma- tion of different systems of philosophy, which may be expected to “abound as before, and be as various as ever.” They will still “ have their day and cease to be,” in the future as in the past, being necessarily only “ broken lights,” but pragmatism will not fall with them, for the reason that it will be “ more than they” and, therefore, not identified with any of them. ,
That pragmatism should have encountered bitter opposition was what might have been expected. Has it not been so with every great movement in human thought from the time of Protagoras, with his famous dictum, “ man is the measure of all things,” down to the present time? It seems inevitable that all must run the gauntlet of criticism. Perhaps, this helps to determine “the survival of the fittest.” Pro- fessor James R. Angell has recently said:
Signs are not wanting that the asperity of its critics is already softening— especially those who come out from behind the screen of anonymous reviews.
This would seem to be true, since even Mr. Bradley has said of Professor James’s last book :
While reading the lectures on Pragmatism, I, doubtless like others, am led to ask myself, “ Am I and have I been always myself a Pragmatist?” This question I still find myself unable to answer.
However, the distinguished author of “ Appearance and Reality ” may have made this statement in a Pickwickian sense. If it be true, as has been somewhat sneeringly said, that pragmatism has made com- paratively few converts among the professional philosophers, but has made its strongest appeal to the men in the street, it may be fittingly replied that this has been likewise true of the greatest movements in the world’s history. That the common people have heard its teachers gladly may prove to be, not its reproach, but its honor and its glory. Again and again it has happened that “not many wise men after the
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WHAT PRAGMATISM IS 585 flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called,” but rather those who have become as little children, single-minded and simple-hearted.
We are still passing through one of those great transitional eras of human thought which recur at somewhat irregular intervals. It may be said to have begun some fifty years ago with the launching of the evolutionary hypothesis, but when or what the end may be no one can say. Whatever the result may be, whether for good or ill, things will never be just the same again.
But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder, Shall wholly do away, I ween, The marks of that which once hath been.
There is a spirit of unrest in the air which has invaded and seriously affected, not only philosophy and science, but religion and government. In fact, it would seem that all things are being called in question, and that “there is a general reaction against uncritical acceptance of the authority of tradition along all lines of thought.” What may ulti- mately survive or what may perish we cannot tell. Some of us believe that the pragmatic movement is one of the contributing causes, per- haps the most important, toward bringing about this condition of affairs. We think that it has already accomplished a most salutary work in philosophy and religion, which is far from being finished, and we look for it to make its presence strongly felt along educational and governmental lines. We believe that it is destined to invade our law-making bodies and courts of justice, where it must be admitted that it is sorely needed. In fine, we believe that the days of blind authority and antiquated precedents are numbered, and that the prin- ciple of pragmatism will perform a like mission in the world to that of the woman’s leaven in the three measures of meal. It has been ironically spoken of as “a new gospel in philosophy.” To some of us it has proved to be a veritable gospel indeed—a gospel of freedom, an evangel of hope.
VOL, Lxxv. — 39.
THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY
IMMIGRATION AND THE FUTURE AMERICAN RACE
By Dr. ALBERT ALLEMANN
ARMY MEDICAL MUSEUM, WASHINGTON, D. C.
i. people of the thirteen colonies, the builders of the American
Union, were almost exclusively of the Anglo-Saxon race. The immigration which set in after the war of independence and continued during the greater part of the nineteenth century, was composed of | people not dissimilar from those early colonists. They came from the British Isles, Scandinavia, Germany and the smaller Teutonic countries. But during the last twenty-five years the number of immigrants from those regions has steadily decreased and has now sunk to very small f numbers, while the immigration from Italy, Hungary, Greece and Russia has increased from year to year during the same period of time, and, of late years, has assumed truly enormous proportions. Thus while the earlier immigrants were of a reasonably homogeneous race, almost entirely of Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic origin, just enough leav- ened with Celtic elements to quicken the phlegmatic pulse of that cold northern race, the majority of the immigrants that landed on our shores during the last quarter of a century, are quite dissimilar in their origin, language, customs and religion from the original settlers of the American Union.
It is claimed by some writers that all these various races, which are now forming the population of the United States, will, in the course of time, fuse together and produce a new and superior type of people. Other writers go still farther; they assert that the immense numbers of this later immigration will overwhelm this country and, in the course of a few generations, supplant the original stock of Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic settlers.1_ Both these views are erroneous. It is impossible, as we shall see, that a general intermixture throughout this mighty empire can take place, much less will the later immigrants be able to supplant the descendants of those sturdy pioneers who first settled the vast prairies and fertile valleys of this great republic.
There are so many and so varied types among these later immi- grants, and they are generally so much inferior to the native American
1“ The awful tragedy, forever repeating itself, of hero nations building lordly palaces in which servant races will some day pitch their gipsy camps, will also set in in America, and the descendants of the sturdy Old English and Teutonic pioneers, a race that is said to possess the finest long-heads and the
heaviest brains, will have only worked for Magyars, Slavs, Italians and Negroes.” Kraus, Polit.-Anthrop. Rev., Leipz., 1906-7, V., 695.
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IMMIGRATION AND THE AMERICAN RACE 587
population, that such a mixture would not be desirable. Herbert Spencer, Gobineau and others have pointed out that a mixture of races, very dissimilar, produces an inferior type of people. History bears out this view. The modern peoples that dwell in the Mediter- ranean basin present to-day a greater mixture of dissimilar races than any country on the globe, yet these regions, once the center of civiliza- tion, have certainly not produced a superior type of humanity. If the mixture of two races of equal vigor, energy and civilization, but very dissimilar in their racial make-up, produces an inferior people, much less can the fusion of several races, some of which are of a very inferior civilization, produce a fair type of humanity.” It is the purpose of this article to show that no general mixture of the original Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic stock with the various heterogeneous elements of the later immigration will take place. We shall see that these later arrivals settle almost entirely in the large cities, and that they will there, in the course of a few generations, be eliminated in the great struggle of modern industrial and commercial life. But first we must get ac- quainted with the history and character of the various races which form the present population of the United States.
Broadly speaking, we have two great classes of immigrants, those that came before about the year 1885 and those that came after that year. The native home of the former was northwestern Europe and the bulk of them belongs to the so-called Teutonic, or Scandinavian, or northern blond race; the latter came from the Mediterranean basin and eastern Europe, and present a number of racial types.
The Scandinavian or Teutonic race was divided into a number of barbarian tribes when the Romans first made their acquaintance. These tribes lived in Scandinavia, northern Germany and on the is- lands of the Baltic Sea. Full of vigor and countless in numbers, they began to make invasions into the territories of the Roman Empire, and though frequently defeated by Roman science and discipline, they never gave up until, during the fifth century, they overran all the western provinces of the great empire and founded new states and new nations in the regions they conquered. All the modern nations of western Europe are more or less a mixture of the original Celto-Roman in- habitants with these northern conquerors; but as the latter were far in the minority, the Teutonic blood has, in the course of many cen- turies, been more or less eliminated; only the aristocracies of these countries, avoiding intermarriage with the subject races, preserve to this day the characteristics of their northern forefathers. This race exists
? Macchioro ascribes the decline of the Roman empire to the great inter- mixture of the many dissimilar races within its borders, and especially on the Italian peninsula. The greater part of the population of Rome during Imperial
times consisted of foreigners, Rome presented a similar picture to New York to-day. Polit.-Anthrop, Rev., Leipz., 1906-7, V., 557 et seq.
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to-day in its greatest purity only in Scandinavia, in northwestern Ger- many and in England.* Its chief physical characteristics are blond hair, a fair complexion, tall stature and especially a distinctly dolicho- cephalic shape of the head. Now as Ripley justly remarks,‘ this long- headedness does not ipso facto imply a strong character, or superior mental power. The negroes, the Spaniards, the Sicilians are dolicho- cephalic without showing any intellectual superiority.©5 But this par- ticular long-headed northern race excelled and still excels by great mental qualities. It is the dominating race of modern times. It forms the ruling and predominating element in the three most powerful na- tions of the present day, England, Germany and the United States. Through the Anglo-Saxons, its most vigorous branch, it carried Euro- pean civilization to the uttermost parts of the earth. The higher classes and the dynasties of the modern European nations belong to this northern race. Lapouge found that most of the great Frenchmen are of this type and are the descendants of the early Teutonic invaders.*® The majority of the great Italians who, during the Renaissance, made northern Italy the most enlightened country in the world, were the descendants of the northern conquerors, who during the great migra- tion settled in that part of Europe.? Likewise a close inquiry would probably show that the great thinkers and writers of middle and south- ern Germany, where the brachycephalic Alpine race forms the bulk of the population, are the descendants of the long-headed Teutons who settled among them. These northern peoples surpass all others in vigor, energy and self-control; they are aristocratic in their nature, domineer- ing, oppressive to inferior races; but they are liberty-loving, have an innate love for law and order, and are above all other races capable of self-government ; and it is certainly not accidental that all the branches of this race are protestants.
It is of descendants of this long-headed northern race that the great majority of the agricultural population of the United States is made up, and it is its very best elements that settled the American states. The people that founded the thirteen colonies belonged to the most energetic and most independent elements of old England. Only men of an indomitable courage and superior intellect would dare to brave the dangers of a distant and unknown country. Many left their homes
*Green, in his “ History of the English People,” holds that the Saxon invaders almost entirely destroyed or drove out the Celto-Roman inhabitants, and the ethnographical study of the modern English people certainly sustains him.
* Ripley, “ Races of Europe,” New York, 1899, 43.
*Some of the greatest men of history were brachycephalic. The hats of Napoleon I., which are still preserved, are almost circular.
* Rev. d@anthrop., Paris, 1887, XVI., 76.
*Woltman, Polit.-anthrop. Rev., Leipzig, 1905-6, IV., 197, and 1906-7, V., 244.
IMMIGRATION AND THE AMERICAN RACE
589
on account of religious or political persecution; they stood above their fellow men in independence of thought and love of freedom. Thus by a process of natural selection only the best people of Old England came to settle the American colonies and to form the solid nucleus around which the great American nation was to form.* Of these early settlers only the most vigorous, the most intelligent, again survived ; the weaker elements succumbing to the new conditions, the climate, the dangers of a new country.
After the war of independence came the Irish, the Germans, the Scandinavians, the Austrians, the Swiss. The Celtic colonists, coming from Ireland, Wales and parts of Scotland, mixed with the Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic settlers. They have undoubtedly greatly modified the character of the American people. The American is less stolid, less phlegmatic than the Englishman; he is quicker, more nervous; in vivacity he approaches the mercurial Frenchman. The character of the American people was much less affected by the people who came from middle and southern Germany, from Austria and Switzerland, because these peoples are themselves the product of a mixture between the Teutonic conquerors and the brachycephalic Alpine race and were thus a less heterogeneous element than the Celtic immigrants. Here, too, a selective process was at work. It-was still the days of the sailing vessel and the prairie schooner. Only the strongest, most energetic, most independent would undertake such a long, tedious and dangerous voy- age. Ammon, in his most interesting study on the population of South- German cities, has shown that it is mostly the long-headed as the most energetic people who move from the rural districts to the cities. From this we may infer that the countries just mentioned sent principally this class of people across the ocean to mingle their blood with a kin- dred race.
The greater part of this earlier immigration belonged to the agricul- tural classes. Large numbers of families came from the rural districts of northern and central Europe in quest of new homes, where they might enjoy greater freedom and have larger opportunities, and where they might be enabled to leave their children a goodly inheritance. Only
*#ngland has for centuries sent out her best elements to colonize foreign regions, and if there is any truth in the assertion of some modern English writers that the British people is declining physically and intellectually, the fact that that wonderful country has for centuries been drained of its most valuable blood, would certainly not be one of its least causes. While her nearest relatives, the Germans, spent their best powers in fruitless internecine wars, England sent her best people into the most distant regions as the carriers of intellectual culture and Anglo-Saxon civilization; and should her power ever decline the famous boast of Macaulay will prove true. England’s glory will never perish, her very spirit is taking a new birth in America, Australia and South Africa. These mighty colonies will bear witness of England’s greatness in all future centuries.
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a comparatively small portion of these people established themselves in the large cities; the great bulk of thera went west and settled, side by side with the pioneers from the easter states, the broad and fertile prairies of the Mississippi Valley and the sunny slopes of the Pacific Coast. It is true, a general intermixture of the various branches of this northern race did not take place equably throughout the country. There are large territories in many states where certain nationalities estab- lished distinct and separate settlements. Extensive tracts in Pennsyl- vania, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, Texas and other states were settled by Germans alone. The Swedes and Norwegians established their new homes mostly in the northwest. The purest Anglo-Saxon blood we find in the southern states. The Celtic immigrants formed nowhere large separate settlements ; they are scattered equably all over the union. One important fact must be noted here. A very large portion of the people of Celtic origin did not settle in the rural districts, but estab- lished themselves in the great cities, in New York, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, etc., where, as we shall see later, they will disappear in the course of a few generations.
About the middle of the ninth decade of the last century an entirely new immigration began to set in. The new arrivals came from southern and eastern Europe, from Italy, Greece, Hungary, Bohemia, Russia. Hailing from an entirely different region of Europe, they differ com- pletely in their racial characteristics from the earlier immigration. Considering only the head form, some of these people would show no marked difference from the Anglo-Saxon or Teuton. The Sicilians, the Neapolitans, the Greeks, are more or less dolichocephalic. But some anthropologists lay entirely too much stress on the headform. It is evident that purity of race is of far greater importance than the shape of the head. But these Mediterranean countries have probably the most mixed population of any region on the globe. This manifold in- termixture began during the later periods of the Roman republic. The numerous prisoners taken in the many and frequent wars were sold as slaves in Italy and the provinces bordering on the Mediterranean Sea. Mommsen estimates the slave population of the Italian peninsula in the times of Sulla at twelve to fourteen millions, twice as numerous as the free population.® These slaves came from the most distant regions, and were mostly barbarians, in every respect dissimilar from the Roman people.
The island of Sicily presents perhaps the best example of this mani- fold intermixture of the Mediterranean peoples. In the earliest cen-
*Mommsen, “ Rim. Gesch.,” 1857, II., 396. During the later times of the
Republic the aristocratic classes acquired immense estates throughout Italy. They bought out or drove out the small landed proprietor and worked the land with slaves. The disappearance of the great middle class, the small land- holders, was one of the chief causes of the downfall of the great empire.
IMMIGRATION AND THE AMERICAN RACE 591
turies Greek colonists came to establish their cities among the native Siculi. Later the Carthaginians and after them the Romans brought great numbers of slaves to the island. Goth and Vandal came and dis- appeared. The Saracens, themselves mixed with black blood, held the island nearly two hundred years, until the island was conquered by the Normans. All these races left their traces in the modern population of Sicily. But where once the great cities of Syracuse, Agrigentum, Segesta, flourished we find to-day ignorance, poverty, crime; here is the home of the Black Hand and the Mafia. The southern part of the Italian boot, the old kingdom of Naples, has almost the same history as Sicily, and the modern conditions there are not much different. The best portion of the Italian people are the brachycephalic North-Italians. It is these sturdy and energetic people who have brought about Italian unity. By their thriftiness, intelligence and love of law and justice they form the backbone of the Italian monarchy.’® If we cross the Adriatic we find on the Balkan peninsula a mixture of peoples, a Vélk- ergemisch, made up of hardly less numerous elements than the popula- tion of Italy. The Slavic race forms here a predominating element among a population greatly mixed in other ways. The modern Greeks are largely of Slavic origin. They are not the descendants of the an- cient Greeks. That noble race, greatly mixed with barbarian blood during the middle ages, was almost completely destroyed in the course of the frequent uprisings against Turkish rule. Slavic immigrants gradually repeopled the country. The same intense mixture of different races we find in Asia Minor and Syria, countries which send consider- able numbers of immigrants to our shores. The least mixed of all these races are the Slavs of Russia. Yet this people has little in common with the race that settled America. The Russians are behind all other nations of Europe in social and political development. The mass of the people is ignorant, servile, superstitious, and, according to the opinion of a close observer, unfit for self-government."
The broad-headed Jews are not as pure a race as has commonly been supposed. They have been greatly mixed with the peoples among whom they lived. Especially is this true of the Russian and Polish Jews, who form such a large portion of the American immigrants. The best type of all these various peoples are probably the brachycephalic Hungarians. Though dissimilar from the other races of Europe, they possess valuable qualities; they are preeminently an intellectual people and well fitted for self-government.*?
These are the peoples from whom the later immigration to the United States is recruiting itself. All differ among themselves as much as they
The immigration from this region is much smaller than from southern Italy.
11 Carl Schurz, “ Reminiscences,” V., I.
1 Ripley, “ Races of Europe,” p. 431.
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differ from the long-headed northern race, which occupies to-day the rural districts of the American Union. Not one of them has reached a high degree of civilization. They have not proved their capability of self-government. They are illiterate and differ in their religious beliefs, their languages and customs, from the Teutonic peoples. They are’ vivacious, restless, turbulent, and do not possess that respect for law and a well-regulated government which is inborn in the northern race. They bring rarely whole families with them.** No process of selection is now at work as in former days. A modern sea voyage has not the dangers and terrors of earlier times. The better and best people stay now at home and only the lower classes emigrate. A mixture of these races with the earlier immigrants could not possibly produce a superior people, as we sometimes read in newspaper articles; it would vitiate and deteriorate the American race, and might prepare for this nation the fate of the Roman empire."*
At the time when the immigrants from the south and east of Europe began to arrive in larger numbers on the American shore the vast tracts of public lands had, as we have seen, been occupied by the Anglo-Saxons and the other Teutonic peoples, mingled with considerable numbers of Celts. There were no large territories left where any great numbers of these newcomers could have settled. But these later immigrants are not agriculturally inclined; they would not settle in the country even \ if public lands were still accessible to them. They belong to the poorest classes, were mostly brought up in cities, and are not adapted to the cultivation of the soil. With the exception, perhaps, of the Poles an exceedingly small number of these later immigrants settle in the country.**> The Russian Jew is a city dweller; the Greek and the Syrian stay in the cities; the Hungarian and the Slav take to mining; the Italians who do not follow mining or railroading prefer the large cities. Ripley asserts that four fifths of our foreign-born citi- zens live in the twelve principal cities of the country.’® It is quite certain that the greater number of these are of the later immigration.
We have thus shown that the Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic stock,
* Ripley, Atlantic Monthly, December, 1908. About 70 per cent. of these immigrants are males.
“To withstand and counteract the steadily growing power of the yellow races the American nation requires all the strength and unity of a homogeneous r people.
* How few of these immigrants settle on public lands may be seen from a
late announcement of the Chamber of Commerce of Spokane, Wash. (April, 1909). It shows that during fourteen months 106,000 new settlers established themselves in the states of Washington, Idaho, Oregon and Montana. Of this number only 10,000 were immigrants from Europe and almost all of these came from Great Britain and the Teutonic countries.
% Atlantic Monthly, December, 1908. More than 800,000 Jews live in New York alone; most of them came to this country during the last twenty-five years.
IMMIGRATION AND THE AMERICAN RACE 593
mixed with Celtic elements, forms the rural population of the United States, while the greater portion of the population of the larger and largest cities is composed of the new immigration. It is a bold assump- tion that the United States is a “ melting-pot ” in which all the races of Europe are fused to a new race. A general intermixture of the old and the new immigrants can take place only in the large cities while the rural population, the backbone of the nation, will not be appreciably affected. This mixed city population will not persist for any length of time. It is a generally recognized fact that city populations have much less vitality than the agricultural classes. But the surprisingly rapid rate at which families in the cities die out was not known until the remarkable observations of Hansen, Ammon and others were made public.
In modern times the causes which contribute to the rapid destruc- tion of the city population are much more potent than in the past. The cities are generally much larger and it is certain that the healthfulness of a city decreases as its size increases. It is true that sanitary meas- ures are much more efficient than in former times, but it is also true that the destructive influences have grown in strength and new ones have appeared. The modern factory work, the poor housing conditions of the lower classes, tend to destroy life and weaken vitality. Race suicide is practised especially in the cities, while it is almost unknown among the country population. The struggle for existence is much severer in the cities; marriages are fewer; the mortality of children is greater. Prostitution, the curse of large cities, is an enemy to marriage and tends to shorten and destroy life by transmitting and spreading venereal diseases. To all this we must add the attractions of city life, the chase after pleasure, the constant excitement, the nervous strain, which are all hostile to the vitality of families.17 Another cause of the rapid extinction of the city population lies in the very mixture of so many races. There is a biological law that hybrids do not tend to reproduce their kind. The fecundity of such a mixed population is appreciably lower than that of a pure race. Lapouge found that in those regions of France where the brachycephalic Alpine race has pre- served a comparative purity the birth rate is much higher than in the districts where the race is greatly mixed with Teutonic blood. In the latter regions the birth rate is actually decreasing.'®
It is evident that the lower classes, living under less favorable con- ditions than the well-to-do, are more subject to rapid extinction. But
The U. S. Census of 1900 shows that the death rate in the cities of Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Michi- gan, Maine and Vermont was 18.6 per thousand of population, while in the rural districts it was only 15.4 per thousand. Baker, Quart. Publ. Am. Statist. Ass., Boston, 1908, XI., 133.
* Rev, @anthrop., Paris, 1887, XVI., pp. 74 and 526.
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594 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY
the higher classes are not exempt from this iron law. Various causes are mentioned for this fact. Marriages are contracted much later in life among the wealthy, and, as a rule, they have fewer children; the intellectual life seems to be unfavorable to the fecundity of women. Race suicide is more common among the higher classes.’ It is hardly necessary to mention that families of an extremely healthy stock, and living under the most favorable conditions, are able to continue their existence a much longer time. The remarkable vitality of the British aristocracy is due to their athletic habits and to the fact that they spend the greater part of the year on their estates in the country. Ammon holds that the aristocratic classes of the continent “ have favorable pros- pects to perpetuate their family names only if they live on their estates and devote themselves to agriculture and the chase.”*°
The Jews seem to form an exception to what has just been said. They have been city dwellers from the time they left Palestine and began to overrun the countries of the earth. There can be no doubt that they are a very healthy race. In the struggle for existence, during the endless persecutions they had to undergo in every country and at all ages, only the strongest individuals survived. A process of natural selection thus produced a vigorous race. The frugal‘and sober habits and the faithful application of the sanitary precepts of the Mosaic code also contributed greatly to produce a healthy people. But these influ- ences are much less at work in modern times. The vitality of the Jew will be greatly affected by modern city life as we find it in the city of New York, where the great bulk of the Jewish population in this country lives. Tuberculosis, the scourge of the white race, used to be rare among the Jews, but the unsanitary life in the “ sweat-shops ” of New York is also increasing its victims among this people.”*
The rate at which city populations die out is much more rapid than one would ordinarily suppose. Recent researches have thrown much light on this process of elimination. Ammon, in his researches on the population of Carlsruhe and Freiburg (two comparatively small cities) established the fact that the city-born population decreases in the course of two generations from 100 per cent. to 29 and 15 per cent. He sup- poses that on an average the families who move from the country to a city die out in the course of two generations.2* Hansen found that one half of the population of the German cities consists at all times of immigrants from the country districts, and he concludes from this fact that the city population renews itself completely in the course of two generations.2*> We may safely apply these results, which have been
” Ammon, “ Natiirl. Ausl.,” p. 297.
* Ibid., p. 302.
2 Jerusalem, Med. Blitter, Wien, 1909, XXXIT., 181. 2 Ammon, “ Natiirl. Ausl.,” p. 300.
* Hansen, “Drei Bevilkerungsstufen,” 1889, p. 27.
IMMIGRATION AND THE AMERICAN RACE 595 obtained for the German cities, to the great industrial and commercial centers of America, for conditions here are not more favorable to the maintenance of human life. We may assume, therefore, that the fam- ilies that are now living in our large cities will, with few exceptions, die out in the course of two or three generations. It is only through the constant supply which the cities draw from the country that they are able to maintain and increase their population. If a modern city had to rely solely on its own natural increase, its population would steadily decline and finally shrink to an insignificant number. But if the dis- appearing portion of the American city population were constantly replenished by new immigration from Europe there would be no change in the actual conditions. However, the time is near at hand when the government of the United States will be compelled, for economic rea- sons, to close the gates to the great mass of poor immigrants from Europe. When that time comes the cities will have to rely exclusively on the country to replenish their dwindling population. Then the unceasing stream of people, which even now is constantly flowing from the country towards the towns, will reconquer the cities from that alien population which now holds them.** It is clear that the longer this process of conquering the cities by the rural population is going on the more thorough will be the elimination of the alien races. <A few ele- ments of the new immigration will doubtless persist and form a perma- nent part of the future American race, but they will be a desirable acquisition, for by the law of the survival of the fittest they must be considered a superior type of humanity.
We have thus shown that no general intermixture of the old with the new immigration will take place, and that instead of the Anglo- Saxon and Teutonic settlers “ are working for inferior races,”
who will some day displace them, the reverse is true.
There is no doubt that these later immigrants, as laborers, have performed and are performing
an important part in this country; they have contributed not a small part to the wealth of this nation.”
It was not the purpose of this article to minimize the disadvantages and dangers of this later immigration. The presence, in our large cities, of great numbers of these illiterate strangers, who neither under- stand nor sympathize with the political institutions of this country, is
an impediment to municipal reform. So many of these heterogeneous
*This is what one of the orators at the last Congress of Catholic Mis- sionaries had in mind when he said that if the Catholics did not make headway in the country districts, the time was coming when their churches in the great cities would be empty. It is well known that most of the adherents of that denomination live in the great cities.
* Emerson, who certainly spoke with no cynical or mocking motive, did
not hesitate to affirm that these laboring emigrants “have a good deal of guano in their destiny.”
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people are now among us that it would be to the best interests of the country if congress, by suitable legislation, restricted immigration in such a manner as only to admit a small number and only the best ele- ments of these heterogeneous races.
The negro, more dissimilar from the Anglo-Saxon than any other race, has purposely been omitted in this study. Though the negroes form a considerable portion of the agricultural population of a large section of the union, a mixture between the two races, as is the case in Latin America, will never take place. The Anglo-Saxon is too proud and too much bent on the preservation of his racial purity to admit of any such intermixture. He even rejects the mulatto who shows the slightest traces of black blood. The negro is physically and intellectu- ally inferior to the white man; he is several thousand years behind the white race in his intellectual development and, as Huxley observed, will never be the equal of the white man. In the great struggle for existence which, in future centuries, will grow in intensity, the negro will be eliminated, “ he will melt away before the breath of the white man as snow melts under a hot wind.” ‘This is the probable solution of the negro problem in the United States. One of the chief means by which this process of elimination is hastened, is the marked tendency of the negro to leave the rural districts and to settle in the large cities, where he has much less chance of survival than the more energetic and thrifty white man.
* Ammon, “ Nattirl. Ausl.,” p. 325.
SCHOLARSHIP
PRODUCTIVE
ENVIRONMENT AND PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP
By Dr. W. J. HUMPHREYS
WASHINGTON, D. C.
é Neg say that ours is the best age the world has ever known is to state
a simple truth. Even though we can claim for literature no living Homer, nor Dante, nor Shakespeare; for art no Phidias, nor Michel Angelo, nor Rubens; for moral suasion no Confucius, nor Zoroaster, nor Mahomet, still the statement is true. True because for the west as well as for the far east this is the age of Meiji—the age of enlightenment. True because man to-day has more knowledge than ever before of the laws of the universe in which he is placed, and because this knowledge is power ; the power by which he brings inanimate nature to his aid; the power that determines his efficiency and fixes his place on the scale of civilization. It is this knowledge, slowly gained through the ages, and his ability to use it, that raises man above the plane of the mere animal and gives him dominion over all the earth and its creatures.
He alone has discovered even so simple a thing as how, by putting the half burned logs closer together and by adding fresh fuel, to keep burning the fire that, like himself, many an animal enjoys but knows not how to obtain; a discovery that has been of incalculable benefit to him and will be. And so too each additional discovery, by the fuller knowledge and wider control of nature it brings, marks a gain in the struggle for life and for happiness. It lays broader and deeper the foundation upon which our arts and our civilization are based, and
stamps, therefore, the discoverer as a benefactor of the human race.
There is no intention here to imply that people without originality are necessarily useless. In fact, they are very far from being so, for the practise of the arts is the end of science, and for this one does not need in the least to be original. Nevertheless, all material progress does de- pend absolutely upon the investigator and the inventor; upon that rare man, the genius that discovers the secrets of nature, and upon that host of skillful men who cleverly use these discoveries in devising mechanical and other means of meeting every-day needs.
Science, as just implied, is not an end within itself, at least not an important one, for it is the bringing of nature’s forces to our service, the application of her laws to the development of useful arts, and not the abstract knowledge of the laws themselves, that chiefly concerns mankind ; and, therefore, being cognizant of only its mediate benefac- tors, the public gives its laurels and its material rewards to the inventor and the manufacturer, rather than to the investigator and the scholar. But in this, as in so many other things, the decision of the majority is
598 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY
wrong and the judgment of the public not to be trusted. Some praise may very well be given to the manufacturer and a great deal more to the inventor, for the work of each is essential to the good of the public; but, after all, the real honor is due the investigator who, by patient research and keenness of insight, discovered the laws that made possible the in- vention and its uses. Only let some genius discover electrical waves and in time there will be devised many systems of wireless telegraphy, or let the mysterious X-ray and how to produce it be revealed and soon there will be hundreds of clever devices for its practical use. And so it is through all the arts and all the sciences, where there is one to lead and discover there are many to follow and apply, and countless millions to enjoy. A Newton, a Darwin, a Pasteur, rarely is found, but wherever he may be there are, besides himself, many others who can and who do perform the necessary, but always secondary, function of turning his discoveries to every-day uses so that all mankind, as long thereafter as the race may last, can live more securely and more happily.
It is man’s power of investigation and of discovery that enables him to bring the forces of nature to his aid, without which help he would perish wholly or at best live only as the beasts of the forest. It is science that makes two blades of grass grow where but one grew before, and this is basic, for by it we conquer in the struggle for existence. It is basic because self-preservation is everywhere and always the first law of nature, and because whatever else happens, and before any higher development is possible, our physical needs must be provided for.
The author fully concurs in every claim that can be made for the intellectual and the moral uplift due to the beautiful and the artistic, whether in literature, music, painting or any other form whatsoever in which they can find expression; but these are apart from his present discussion which concerns the knowledge of nature’s laws and their ap- plication to human affairs. Neither is he unmindful of nor without ap- preciation for the great good, other than material, that follows in the wake of scientific study and investigation. He believes that the declara- tion : “ The truth shall make you free,” is as applicable and as necessary to things intellectual as to things spiritual; but he also holds that those truths of nature that aid in providing for our daily needs are just as effective as any others in freeing the human mind from the bondages of fear and of superstition, and that therefore only those truths that offer definite applications, and those essential to a better understanding of nature and a fuller control of her forces, are really worthy to be sought after patiently and diligently.
However, the possible usefulness of an investigation is a point to be considered, if ever at all, in determining what question to take up and how to attack it, for the scientific genius investigates, as the poet writes, along any line that appeals to him. In a sense he can not help it, for to him research and experiment are life and happiness; he is still
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a boy who has never outgrown young life’s curiosity and the joy of see- ing new things, nor has he outgrown the stimulus of companionship, the necessity for playmates. He obeys instinctively that best of advice given and followed by Rowland of experimental fame: “ Do something to it, man, do something to it and something will happen,” and there- fore once his investigation is begun he seldom stops to consider of what use the results may be; nor is this often to be regretted since whatever his discoveries, it is practically certain that some day they will have many and unsuspected applications. It was Helmholtz who, to satisfy his own apparently idle curiosity, determined why a cat’s eye glows, or as we say, looks green in the dark. But out of this investigation, which to the practical man would appear utterly trivial and useless, came not only knowledge that shattered certain superstitious fears, but even the ophthalmoscope that every year helps to save the sight of thousands of human beings.
This beautiful illustration of the unsuspected results of scientific work is scarcely more than typical, for however keen the zest of investi- gation, however glorious the hour of discovery, these joys of the few are as nothing in comparison with the sum total of the peace of intellectual freedom and of the pleasures of physical comfort their labors provide for the multitudes of every living nation and of all future generations. And therefore it would seem that, of all people, those who, by their per- sistent labors and by the keenness of their intellect, make the world more fruitful and nature more the servant of man, would be honored and en- couraged ; that they would be sought after and put in those positions that would enable them to do their work best, and where they could exert the greatest influence upon others by inspiring as many as possible to emulate their example. And indeed this in some measure is the happy state of affairs in the cultured centers of the old world; and it is there that nearly all the power that comes of knowledge had its origin.
That which makes human progress possible, that which has given us our present civilization, and points the way to a higher, should com- mand our unqualified admiration and our every encouragement. And in so far as they depend upon our knowledge of the laws of the uni- verse in which we are placed and from which we can not escape, in so far as they depend upon our luxuries and upon the means of providing our necessities, of protecting ourselves from plague and from pestilence —in so far as they depend upon making the world more fruitful and therefore the abode of a more numerous and happier people—so far as civilization and progress depend upon all these things, just so far they depend absolutely upon the labors of the creative scholar, upon the work of the investigator, the seeker after and the discover of nature’s truths and nature’s laws. It matters not how firmly the man of affairs estab- lishes some new and important industry, nor how readily the public ac- cepts what he has to offer, whether the convenience of modern lighting,
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600 SCIENCE MONTHLY the facilities of wireless and of other methods of communication, or any of the thousands of things that steam and electricity can supply, every one traces back beyond the artisan and the financier to the oft forgotten investigator but for whose labors there would be occasion for neither, and even kings could not have as a luxury that which all the world now deems a necessity.
It is absolutely essential to our future progress, nor can this be emphasized too strongly, that we appreciate the inestimable value of pure research; that we realize the futility without it of every effort to advance, and the certainty with it of the creation of new industries, the finding of new comforts and the improvement of man’s every con- dition: and it is equally essential that on realizing this we have the courage to act according to our convictions.
Let us then humbly and honestly inquire what part we Americans as individuals, as communities and as a nation are taking in this the chief labor of the human race for its existence and for its betterment. The average individual, if he is honest with himself, is not likely to feel very proud of his own achievements or of those of his community, nor even satisfied with the earnestness of his efforts; and therefore as a nation we are not able to point with pride to the part we have taken in scien- tific investigations. Good work has been done and is being done in an increasingly large amount, but on the whole, as a nation, we are not doing our duty in this respect, for our productiveness, relative to our numbers, falls far short of that of most of our mother countries, such as England, France, Germany and Holland, and besides many of the more important discoveries that we claim were made by men of foreign birth.
It is not very agreeable to have to admit this state of affairs, but only the ignorant fail to see their own faults, and only the coward re- fuses to admit them. The wise thing to do is to admit them frankly— at least to one’s self—and the courageous thing is to begin promptly and persistently to do one’s full duty as he sees it.
It would be well if possible to learn the cause of this generally ad- mitted rarity of American discoveries, so that as in the case of a disease a remedy can be intelligently sought for. It can not be attributed to race difference, since we are of the same stock that produces so much more on the other side of the ocean. Nor can it be attributed to lack of means, for we boast of the greatest wealth of any nation of this or of any past age, and to our universities we make gifts whose princely magnificence astounds the world. Neither is it due to our mad rush in business, our striving after wealth, for in general our greatest business centers, our wealthiest cities, are the principal sources of our original contributions to knowledge; while that very part of our country which has always ‘boasted ‘its superiority to the sordid things of mammonggey the littleness of business strife, and prided itself upon its intelligence,
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upon its scholarship, its leisure and its devotion to the greatest good of its own people, is the least productive of creative work—in some of the more important sciences even practically sterile.
Here then, in the south, that cause, whatever it is, has its greatest influence, and can therefore the more certainly be determined. Surely though, this mortifying, this deplorable state of affairs does not have to exist, for the south long ago showed her ability in meeting and master- ing great political, military, and judicial problems, and she has to-day as splendid a class of people, as earnest, as capable, as sensitive and as self sacrificing as has any country on the face of the earth, the very qualities essential to scientific achievements. Why then do her people accomplish so little of this kind of work, and why have they no voice in the councils of our national scientific societies ?
But first to show that these statements are true. In Science for December 18, 1908, is given the names of the presidents and secretaries for the Baltimore meetings of a number of scientific organizations— the American Association for the Advancement of Science, its several sections, and twenty-four other societies—in all, seventy-eight names, and just one is from south of the Potomac and the Ohio. Even the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology was officered by men from north of the Potomac. Surely then the voice of the south is faint in the councils of our scientific organizations ; nor has she even a single representative in the whole of the National Academy. But this is not intended in the least as a criticism of any of these societies or of the excellent men they have chosen to represent them. It is a simple state- ment of the facts, so astonishing, however, that if generally realized they could not help arousing that healthy determination that leads to better things.
During the past twelve years the author has had the pleasure of at- tending many of the meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, sections A and B, of the American Physical Society and of the Astronomical and Astrophysical Society of America, but in all this time, except for an occasional contribution from one uni- versity, rarely ever heard a paper that was written in what are known as the southern states. He has repeatedly heard papers, often excellent ones, written at northern universities by men of southern birth, but seldom, if ever, a paper by a northern man in a southern university.
This great inequality, even when the men are the same, in productive scholarship between the northern and the southern parts of our country can have but one explanation—difference in environment; and it ex- plains too the inferior part we as a nation are taking in preparing the way for any real advance in civilization.
It is the stimulus of his environment, as every creative scholar knows, that is chiefly responsible for the quantity and even in large VOL, Lxxv.—40.
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measure for the quality of all the original work he does, and as our educational institutions, equipped with their splendid libraries, museums and laboratories, are the only places where men are supposed to give their entire time to knowing things and to training others to know, therefore the tone, as we say, of its universities, their attitude towards science, is the chief determining cause of the part any nation takes in adding to the sum of human knowledge and of human power; and therefore too it is properly expected of them that they shall seek the highest type of scholarship, and constantly maintain that peculiar en- vironment that stimulates to creative work. The spirit of its commu- nity of course has more or less influence on the work of every university, but it is never of first importance, for each takes the institution in its midst for a model, and as no one rises to the level of his ideal, so too no community equals even in sterile scholarship, much less productive, that of its university. In the main this spirit of the community is but that of its own college reflected in a modified and enfeebled form. Of course there are good and bad reflectors, but everywhere the important thing is the quality and intensity of the central light. In fact the public, whose business is the making of money and the getting of bonds, can not be expected to be so enthusiastic about these higher things as are educational institutions whose very existence is for the development of brains and the training of hands, and therefore for some time to come the university is likely to remain, as it has been in the past, the source of much the greater part of all original knowledge, in spite of the fact that at present there is an increasing amount coming from governmental and from business laboratories, for both these latter, necessarily, are greatly restricted in their fields of operation. Business men wish con- ducted investigations that promise immediate financial returns to them- selves, and investigators that do this class of work have something of the same restrictions thrown about them that hedge in the advertising poet whose inspiration is a special brand of soap; and mighty little of a first class order has ever come from either source. Government institutions, though allowing a greater latitude than do business firms in the investi- gations selected, often feel compelled to have for their object immediate returns that will encourage congress and the country to continue their support, and only too frequently does this lead to insistent calls for “copy,” as though the investigator could submit at stated intervals original ideas and finished results with the same regularity that the farmer can raise a new crop of pumpkins.
There remain the special laboratories of the Carnegie Institution that are an inspiration to all the world, but even here the investigator is not so free as is the university professor to follow whithersoever his tastes and his talents may lead, and, besides, even these laboratories have not the opportunity that the university has of fixing the lives of men, of molding public opinion and of determining the destiny of our country.
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Wherever then any country is to blame for its barrenness in scientific ideas and results, this blame attaches to her universities. If a commu- nity in which a university is situated is without interest in matters of a scientific nature it is because the university itself cares but little for such things and does less.
As stated above, the south is the least productive of original work of any part of our country, and the fault lies at the doors of the south- ern universities—as the following several illustrations will make clear —the institutions whose duty it is to train by precept and by example.
A good instance emphasizing this point is the case of a certain southern man whose name is well known to the scientific world because of his investigations while in the north. On finally accepting, after much hesitation, a position in one of the oldest and best of the southern universities he remarked pathetically in regard to his scientific career “T am going now to be laid upon the shelf for the rest of my life.” And, while he is an ornament to the faculty of which he is a member, as he would be to any other, he fully understood and correctly judged the lethal effect on all scientific aspirations of his boyhood environment,
Where the mocking bird calls to dreams of fair women, And the soul drifts on in a somnolent ease.
But lest this be regarded as a mere isolated case, due to the peculiar- ities of a single individual, it may be well to describe the attitude towards creative work maintained by the heads of certain institutions.
One of these, the president of one of the largest institutions in the south, has more than once assured the writer that he regarded investiga- tion on the part of professors as a thing which took just that much time from the students, and that therefore it should not be encouraged—a fallacy that once obtained, but outgrown more than a century ago, at one of the great northern colleges. And the pity of it is this man’s opinion clearly is having an influence on his institution, for in certain of the sciences it is about as much heard of as is the Imperial Univer- sity of Timbuctoo.
The president of another institution of almost boundless claims (this applies to both), when he was on the point of closing a contract with a really capable man, so runs the information from this man him- self, invited him to take part in a prayer meeting. This was declined on the ground that, while a regular church attendant, he was not an active ‘ church worker. He was then informed that this particular institution raised up christian young men (by implication others did not), and that he, the president, regarded active work in the Young Men’s Chris- tian Association on the part of a professor as of more importance than his teaching.
From a certain standpoint this view of the situation may be logical enough; at any rate, the Young Men’s Christian Association, in its
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forms it well; but still there is good authority for rendering unto Cesar he things that are Cesar’s, and if the chief purpose of a secular college is to train the intellect, then surely the main duty of its professors is to know their own specialities, to work in them and to teach them.
So delicately sensitive a thing as the creative instinct, the uncom-
promising devotion to truth, even though it conflict with fond notions, seldom thrives in a sectarian college, whether honestly sectarian, sec- tarian everywhere except in the catalogue, or only sectarian for adver- tising purposes. The open-minded investigator would be wholly out of place, even miserable, in such an environment, and often, as in this particular case, is informed that his services are not wanted. Such institutions are of but little credit to any church and less to real scholar- ship. Science and religion are not on the same plane; they deal with totally different things by entirely different methods, and therefore can no more conflict or agree than mathematics can conflict with morals. Consequently any attempt to unite the two is wholly illogical and can lead to nothing but utter confusion. A man of course may be both religious and scientific, but science is no part of his religion, however much the life he lives may be better and more useful because of his science.
One more illustration; probably the best of all for showing the deplorable state of affairs at perhaps many an institution in all sections of the country, for there are echoes of it from every quarter. Not long ago the president of a leading southern university was charged with the troublesome duty of finding several new men for his faculty, and in the course of his inquiries let it be understood that a man with research aspirations and first-class attainments was not desired, and made the astonishing statement, in support of his position, that a research man is seldom ever a teacher. What he really wanted, he said, was men that would mix with the boys and with the people of the state—a clever shoe drummer might have met these conditions.
As mixing with the people suggested a kind of missionary work for the purpose of winning popular favor, he was asked if he was not limited by public sentiment to draw his faculty from his own state. No, he said, fortunately not, as his state furnished no men of sufficient scholarship.
Now right here are brought together the cause we are looking for and its effect. This university does not wish men of first-class attain- ments given to original work. Its environment must therefore be stifling to every creative effort ; and this is the cause that produces such a disastrous effect upon the state that it can furnish no men sufficiently trained (and note that high attainments are not required) to fill the chairs in its own institutions. In the name of reason how can it be expected to? And so long as this condition continues what possible hope is there that it will ever be able to do any better?
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The writer does not advocate exclusive use of home talent. On the contrary, he urges very general exchange, but when a state has nothing suitable for its own use exchange is impossible—it can only import.
If scholarship is worth while, if knowledge is of any value, and research productive of good, then this condition of affairs is utterly intolerable. The change to a better simply must and will be made, for no community high-minded, sensitive and capable as the south is will do anything other than welcome an honest description of things as they are, and then wherever not creditable set about to correct them.
In this case the task is a difficult one, but the need of it more than manifest, and the task weighs first and heaviest upon the presidents of the universities. Power implies duty, and theirs in the main is the power to shape the destiny of their institutions, and through them of the communities, the states and the nation of which they are a vital part.
Wherever the president of an institution gives no hearty encourage- ment to first-class attainments, wherever creative ability is held to dis- qualify a man for a position in a university rather than to be the first essential, at that place is stagnation and death in all that stimulates the scholar to his noblest efforts, and at best only a lot of weary task- masters driving to their unwilling grinds so many human phonographs that give back just what they have taken down of the words of another.
It may not be the university president of the south that is to blame for the origin of the sterile condition of scholarship in his section, but it is to him we must look for the needed change. He may find the labor difficult, but it is possible and that is sufficient. He can not claim that his students are without the ability to follow the leadership of a master, for in the north and in Europe, wherever they have the chance, they do follow masters, and follow them to a purpose.. Nor can paucity of material equipment any longer be claimed, since many of the southern institutions are equipped far beyond the extent indicated by the results turned out, and have been for a long while. Indeed for many kinds of creative work the necessary equipment is not great, and besides there are a number of sources from which the capable and the active often can secure substantial aid. Then, too, cooperation with one or another of the various scientific bureaus of the national government is eminently practical and because of the many mutual benefits earnestly to be desired. The physicist, for instance, if so inclined, can with but small expense take up the studies of atmospheric electricity, sky polarization, insolation, or any one or more of the many other interesting meteorolog- ical phenomena that are always with him, but which are not yet fully understood. In no other way could he add more to the advancement of his own subject, while at the same time he would be enriching the science of meteorology and thereby improving the art of forecasting. This is only one of many possible suggestions for even the physicist, and similar ones could be made in connection with other branches of
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science. No man need believe there is nothing for him to do, nor no one to appreciate and help him—provided only that he will make it evident by his works that he deserves encouragement and would profit- ably use any material assistance.
For some lines of investigation, as every one knows, an expensive equipment is needed, but, as just explained, there are other things one may do, and besides that state is poor indeed that can not afford sup- port to its university. Note what Germany did for her universities at the close of the Napoleonic wars, and what in turn the universities have done for her. Consider too the attitude of Japan when fighting the greatest battles of all history. Even the emperor’s palace was without heat the whole winter long, but the Imperial University and every school of the empire was fully supported. It was when Port Arthur was still resisting stubbornly and all the issues of the war were unsettled that the eminent Kitazato, in company with many American scientists, first saw exhibited a certain new and important piece of research appa- ratus. The Americans expressed an admiration of and a desire for the apparatus, but each said that his department could not afford it. Kita- zato, however, saw its value and recognized that an institution active in his specialty could not afford to do without it, and therefore ordered it at once and insisted upon the earliest possible delivery.
This is the spirit that within thirty years has made the University of Tokio one of the world’s greatest centers of learning and of pro- ductive scholarship, and this is the spirit the absence of which has permitted that drowsy, contented introspection that is bringing Nirvana to many an American institution; and especially to those of the south.
O wad some power the giftie gie us To see oursel’s as others see us!
The critic is frequently assured that his is an easy task, and told that if he wishes things different he must at least state clearly what he does want, and show how to get it. Now it is not desired that this article shall be taken as a criticism chiefly, but rather as an appeal for a larger quantity of high-class creative work, especially at our univer- sities of every section. Nevertheless, a few suggestions, which the author knows to be practicable will be made.
But before suggesting what, in the author’s opinion, are some of the things best to do to render our scholarship more profound and more productive it may be worth while, though it is humiliating to admit it, emphatically to call attention to a few things not to do. Don’t merit contempt by cheaply exploiting the scholar’s noblest work. Don’t set unprepared young men to doing worthless pieces of drudgery—counting the hairs on the end of a white kitten’s tail it may be—and then, after cheating them of their time, try to humbug them into believing that they have been profitably engaged upon important investigations. Don’t
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let research flourish for advertising purposes in the catalogue when there is nothing of it in the laboratory. Dishonesty and humbugery in scholarship and in education probably are the meanest, because the most injurious, of all forms of rascality; and yet, though there should be none of it, who can be found willing to say that it is even uncommon ?
America, as already stated, is not doing her share of creative work, and this inexcusable negligence is far more pronounced in the southern states than it is anywhere else, though no section is free from blame— no institution can claim to be ideal. This is not due to racial peculiari- ties, to want of material equipment, nor to an inordinate struggle for wealth, but chiefly to the atmosphere of the university, to the environ- ment in which the university professor is placed and upon which he must depend for his daily intellectual stimulus.
For schools, academies and colleges that confine themselves strictly to elementary work, creative scholarship on the part of the teachers is not so imperative, but, as the reputation of every institution is that of the work it does and no more, therefore, in the case of those that wish to justify their claims to the title of university, let every important chair, irrespective of the present or prospective quantity of graduate work, be filled only by a man who has contributed something to the advancement of his subject, and who is likely to continue doing so. Such a man, because of his love for his specialty, and because of his thoroughness, usually is an enthusiastic teacher and often an inspiring one—the highest qualification. He who is not a research man seldom induces the love of knowledge in others—blood doesn’t come from turnips.
In the name of civilization and of human progress let no position that presupposes scholarship and offers the sacred privilege of doing work be filled save by him who recognizes that in this case opportunity means duty. The ideal man is one who has a sympathetic appreciation for all sciences and a minute knowledge of his own specialty—one who knows something about everything and everything about something, for nothing short of this can give that accuracy and that resourcefulness essential to the solution of difficult problems, nor that alertness and breadth of view so necessary to the detection and to the understanding of new phenomena. To be sure, the ideal man seldom is found, but it is better to hunt long for the ideally good, than, as sometimes seems to be the case, quickly to secure the ideally bad.
This, then, the careful selection of his faculty, selection and pro- motion according to their productive ability (for by their fruits ye shall know them), is the president’s first and greatest obligation. Nor is this impracticable, for it is the avowed and fruitful policy of the president of one of our leading universities, a policy fully approved by his board, and supported by the legislature to which he is responsible.
Another important thing the president can do—and one of our best
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college presidents did it for years—is to keep himself constantly in- formed, in a general way, of every investigation that is going on in his institution, and to encourage those who are doing this work, publicly and privately. This sort of encouragement costs but little, but, coming from him whose position and whose judgment command his highest respect, is of incalculable help to the weary, sensitive investigator. He needs to be cheered on by the knowledge that what he is doing is meet- ing, not indifference, but active encouragement by those to whom he is most responsible for what he does. The writer has known capable men to be timidly engaged on investigations about which it was almost impossible to get them to say anything at all. They acted as though nature was a huge bungle for which they were responsible and of which they therefore were heartily ashamed, or as if they were on the point of making some wonderful discovery which if suddenly revealed in its perfected form would startle the civilized world.
This frame of mind, harmful alike to the man himself and to his associates, is most unwholesome, and one from which the president, more than any one else, can help to free him, since it often originates in the real or supposed isolation of the victim in his work; a condition, as every scholar knows, inimical to creative activity, whether it be the isolation of positive loneliness, or that worse form, the isolation of un- congenial surroundings. And in this connection it should be remem- bered that because of the intensity and exhausting nature of his work, the research man needs pleasant surroundings and frequent diversions ; conditions over which the president unfortunately has but little control, and which therefore should be given all the more careful consideration, if possible, in the original selection of the institution’s location. The faculty of an isolated institution is itself in great measure isolated, and commonly the creative work one does in a desert, under the oppression of ennui, bears but little relation to what he can do when agreeably situated and surrounded by things intellectually stimulating. The in- vestigator, imaginative like the poet, nervous and often overwrought, is sensitive, and, while easily elated, just as easily depressed ; and there- fore when no one takes an obvious interest in what he is doing, and there are no ready means of diversion, he tends to become morose, and keeps his thoughts to himself, where they are likely to find anything but cheerful company.
However, under all conditions let the investigator be encouraged to talk, let him join with his colleagues in the formation of a local science club for the free exchange of ideas, and there let him talk often and talk freely. It will aid greatly to clear up his own ideas—this explain- ing of things to others—and will help to keep him enthusiastic. In this way his light will not be hid under a bushel, but shine, as it were, from a hilltop where it will be of the greatest help to his neighbors. Because of this sort of encouragement and this sort of united effort and material
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support the creative work of every department and of every scholar in the entire institution will be greater in volume and better in quality.
The proper distribution of routine duties and responsibilities at any institution is an important question, and there is a numerical ratio, not a large one, either, between professors and students beyond which noth- ing can be properly done; but as far as possible let the research man be relieved of routine drudgery and worry of every type. Of course, how- ever, if at the head of his department, he must have something to do with executive work, but this should be only of the most general nature and at infrequent intervals. The routine and the details of it should be left to others. Some one else can do this class of things as well and commonly better, for the mind that is in tune with the one is out of harmony with the other.
Finally let the professors be encouraged to attend the principal meetings of those societies to which they belong, or should belong, and not only to attend but whenever practicable to take with them suitable communications. They are certain to hear at these meetings many papers of interest, and their own communications will receive all that attention and respect they deserve. But far better than the informa- tion they will get from the papers heard, or from the discussion of their own, will be the enthusiasm inspired by the association thus secured, even though temporary, with the productive scholars of the entire country; an enthusiasm that welcomes difficulties and leads, through persistent attack, to their ultimate solution.
It can not be emphasized too strongly that quality of work depends upon efficiency of equipment, and that therefore as the professor is the most essential part of the university’s equipment he at least must be kept free from rust and from corrosion. He must attend the meetings of scholars in his own line, where friendly mental friction will give him that alertness and enthusiasm that will increase the quantity of his work and improve the quality of every thing he does.
It may not be practicable for many institutions to follow the lead of a certain excellent college—one that deserves the name university— and set aside a sum of money to help pay the expenses of its representa- tives at these meetings; but those who can do it will find this an in- vestment that will repay an hundredfold, in enthusiasm, in efficiency and in productiveness.
Frankly, as a nation, and especially in certain sections, we Ameri- cans have not been, and are not now, doing our share of original work; not taking our part in the creation of new arts and the promotion of civilization. But the case for us is far from hopeless; already here and there are signs of a true awakening, a realization that opportunity means duty. The past is not creditable, but the present bids us look confi- dently to the future when soon the sincere and capable alone will achieve success and recognition.
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MEDIEVAL CREATION MYTHS
By Proressor B. K. EMERSON
AMHERST COLLEGE
HERE is perhaps more reserve than formerly in assuming the westward wandering of great hordes out of Asia, but, whether the peoples have or have not migrated, the myths certainly have, and all through western Asia and southern Europe the old biblical stories are strongly blended with dualistic traits that have all the ear marks of Iran. As the light conquers the darkness and ushers in the day, so the darkness conquers the light and ushers in the night. Thus Ormuzd and Ahriman are equal to the confines of eternity and God and Satanael become equal in the blended stories.
Of the many variations of these creation myths which have taken root especially among Slavic peoples in the Caucasus, across southern Russia and the Balkans, I have wilfully chosen those parts which have a geological flavor, and illustrate or parody, in quaint and naive man- ner, many earth forms or earth-forming processes.
I owe most of this material to Oscar Dahnhardt,’ who has collected many medieval stories of the creation of curious interest. In north and west Russia, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the “ Roll of the Divine Books ” tells how, while there was still neither heaven nor earth, the Sea of Tiberias existed, solitary and alone, and it was shoreless.
The story is continued thus in Ukraine (p. 55):
As God would create the world, he spoke to the oldest of his angels, Satanael, with whom he wandered over the sea, and bade him dive to the bottom and bring him up a handful of sand. As he grasped the sand he should say, “I seize thee, Earth, in the name of the Lord! ” But as Satanael came to the bottom the wicked thought came to him, and he said, “In the Lord’s and in my name!” But as he arose again the sand ran out of his hand and he brought up nothing.
The Lord, who noticed what had happened, bade him dive again and forbade him to use his own name, He did this, nevertheless, and again brought up nothing. Only the third time he left out his own name and brought up sand in his open hand. God took it; went out over the sea and scattered it upon the waters and it became land.
But Satanael licked his hand and said, “I will keep back just a little and also make land.” And God asked him if he had any sand and he answered, “ No! ”
Now God blessed the earth in all four directions and it began to grow. But the earth that Satanael had in his mouth began to grow also and became so great that his lips stretched apart.’
*“ Sagen zum Alten Testament.”
MEDIEVAL CREATION MYTHS 611
_ And God said, “Spit it out, Satanael.” And he began to sputter and spat it all out, and wherever it fell cliffs and mountains grew up. Therefore is our earth greatly uneven.
“Wherefore hast thou made such mountains?” asked the Lord, “That man should weary himself in climbing them? ”
“O Lord it is good that it is so hard,” answered the Devil, ‘ For now will man think of you and also not forget me. When he climbs up breathless he will say, ‘Help, Lord!’ When he descends the mountains he will think of me also, and say, ‘The Devil has tempted me up on to this mountain, here one can break his neck only too easily.’ ”
Among the Philippone of the flat plains of Ost Preusen the story has this curious turn:
Then the earth grew in the mouth of the angel, he screamed and called on God for help, and spat out the earth at God’s command, and there grew there- from tobacco and hops.
We may continue the story as it is told among the Moguls (p. 67) :
The earth grew continuously. As it had reached a large compass God and Satanael descended from the clouds and began to dwell upon the earth. From this time on, they used the clouds only for long journeys and when they wished to rise to the heavens.
To increase the number of the living upon the earth, God took two stones and struck them together. On the first stroke the Archangel Michael came forth and on the second the Archangel Gavril. Satanael envied God and wanted also to create servants. So he took two stones and began to strike them together. With every blow there came forth a devil. As he kept on striking a great throng of devils appeared. And God was angry that his companion knew no bounds in creating his kind, and forbade him the further creation of devils.
Satanael stopped only when, after long labor, he found his stones no longer produced devils.
In Transcaucasia they say:
The archangel followed him and they came on a blue stone (or gold stone) which they raised up. But Satanael was under it and he sprang up, grabbed God by the throat, and nearly throttled him. God called on the archangels for help, but they could not free him. There was nothing left but to beg Satanael. “Ask what you will of me, only let me free.” And Satanael said,
*T ask nothing except that we be brothers. And God promised this, whereupon Satanael let him go and went his way.
In a Greisinian variant (p. 32):
Michael and Gabriel wander through the earth, and the crust of the earth was so thin that they sank to the knees, although they wore snowshoes. Always a round stone rolled on before these angels, and God said, “ We are tired of
this stone.” And in spite of the angels’ warning, God shattered the stone with his foot, and lo, Satanael was in the stone.
In the Swanetic narrative:
God and his angels wandered through the world on their wonderful horses, and came on a great white stone. But the angels led God another way. Again they came on the stone and again the angels led God another way. “Some cheating is the cause,” said God to the angels, “that we do not come upon this stone; otherwise we should have reached it already.” The angels answered, “ All right, we will bring you to the white stone, but we believe it will do you
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612 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY
harm.” They went to it and God broke the stone with his whip. Then the devil sprang out of it and grabbed God’s horse. The devil said to God, “I and you were both in the same stone. I and you are of the same origin. I am the heart of the stone like you, so give me part of the world.” While God chose for himself men and animals, the devil chose the souls. But the angels said to him: “Rejoice not overmuch. Know that the souls will remain in your hand only until a Son of God is born, who will free the dead from thy kingdom.” The devil answered: “ That will be a long time hence.”
God placed himself and his archangels upon the cloud, raised himself high over the earth and created the heavens, Satanael made, with his devils, a second heaven that was higher than God’s. God would not live below Satanael and raised himself higher and made a third heaven. In this way, vying with each other, they created nine heavens, one above the other, and Satanael began to build a tenth heaven still higher. Then God lost his patience and commanded his angels that they throw Satanael and his devils down from heaven.
Satanael and his angels fell down upon the earth, Each took his name from the place where he fell. He who fell in the wood became a wood devil, he that fell upon the water became a water devil.
In the Balkans they describe this fall of the angels thus:
As the angels under the earth mourn and complain we feel it as an earth- quake, when they weep on the earth their tears are so hot that long drought
follows, when floating among the stars they shed tears and we see them fall upon the earth as shooting stars.
We may continue the story as it is told by the Bulgarians:
As now Satan saw the great broad earth, he hit upon the deceitful plan of putting God to sleep and then throwing him in the water; taking possession of the earth himself and claiming honor as creator of the earth. God of course knew Satan’s plan, but laid him down as if to sleep. Satan then seized God and carried him to the great water to throw him in. As he came to the shore the land began to grow rapidly so that he could in no wise reach the water. He turned back to the opposite shore, but for the same reason could not reach that. And as he could not reach the water from the third side because of the growth of the land before him, he let God slide down on the ground, and sank down beside him. After he had slept awhile he took God up again and carried him in the fourth direction to the water. As the land began immediately to grow in this direction also, so in this direction also he failed to reach the water,
He then waked God up, saying, “ Arise, God, let us bless the earth! Lo, how it is grown while we slept.” God answered him, “ As you have carried me in four directions, to throw me in the water, and thus with my body described a cross, I have blessed the earth already, that it grow and flourish.” This made Satan wroth and he left God. God remained alone, and the earth grew continu- ously, so that it could no longer be covered by the sun’s light. Then God created out of bis spirit angels and sent the war angel to ask Satanael what he should do to stop the earth’s growing.
In the meantime the devil had made him a goat, and he came to God riding on the back of the goat, for which he had made a beard of earth. Since that time goats have beards to the present day. As the angels saw the devil riding toward them they laughed at him; he was wroth and rode back. On the instant God created a bee and said: “ Fly quickly to Satan and listen to his speech. Return and inform me.” The bee then flew to Satan and perched on his shoulder as he spoke to himself, “Oh, this foolish God (O dieser dummer Gott), he knows not that he needs only to take a stick and mark the earth with a cross
MEDIEVAL CREATION MYTHS 613
and say: ‘This much earth is enough.’ He just doesn’t know what to do! ” Then God blessed the bee and commanded that its wax should serve to illumine weddings and funerals and its honey should heal the sick.
In the Rumanian Sage the bee goes to the wise hedgehog for advice and the hedgehog says:
“Plainly God does not know that he must create mountains and valleys to make room for the waters.”
The Setts say (p. 128):
As the earth was created it did not fit under the arch of heaven. Where shall one put such a great disk? Just then the hedgehog came along and asked what the trouble was, “ Verily the earth is done, but we can not get it under the arch of heaven and it would not do to break a piece off.” “ That’s nothing,” said the hedgehog, “ You must squeeze the disk together a little and then it will go.” Good: God quickly pressed the disk together and it was easy to stick it under the heaven.
Now there appeared here and there, by the pressure, wrinkles which are the present mountains and valleys. God gave the hedgehog, for his shrewd head, an excellent coat, all of needles, so that no enemy can get near him.
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614 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY
THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE
THE MEDICAL SCHOOL AND THE COLLEGE
THE marble palaces which American millionaires have built for the Medical School of Harvard University are justi- fied by their beauty. They will house part of the meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the affiliated societies dur- ing convocation week at the end of the present month, and it would be worth while for scientific men from a distance to attend the meetings if their only object were to see these beautiful and stately halls. But these buildings have not solved the complicated problems of medical education; they have, to a cer- tain extent, fossilized the system of sequestering the medical school from the university. Reinforced cement at Cambridge might have accomplished more for training and research in the medical sciences than marble on the Boston fens.
President Eliot appears to be in large measure responsible for sepa- rating the medical school from the university both in space and time. Shortly before his retirement, he ap- pointed a dean of the school who to a certain extent shares his views. Dean Christian, in his address at the dedi- cation of the Medical Department of Stanford University, said that the in- stitutions which have adopted a com- bined academic and medical course
degree of less value and significance than formerly and have sacrificed one or two years of college work while seeking to conceal this fact by the award of the two degrees, A.B. and M.D.”
President Lowell, who does not hesi- tate to express educational theories at variance with those of his predecessor,
agrees with him in wanting to base the professional schools on the college, and apparently would have the professional schools so ordered that “every college graduate ought to be equipped to enter any professional school.” In his in- augural address he says: “Our law school lays great stress upon native ability and scholarly aptitude, and comparatively little upon the particu- lar branches of learning a student has pursued in college. . Many pro- fessors of medicine, on the other hand, feel strongly that a student should enter their school with at least a rudi- mentary knowledge of those sciences, like chemistry, biology and physiology, which are interwoven with medical studies; and they appear to attach greater weight to this than to his natural capacity or general attain- ments.”
It may be doubted whether in the Harvard Medical School or elsewhere there are professors who attach greater
| weight to rudimentary knowledge of
certain sciences than to natural ca- pacity and general attainments. But
| there are those in the Harvard Medical
School, as appears from an extended
jarticle filling half the Harvard Bul-
letin for November 3, who do not ap- prove the attitude of the administra- tion in determining the relation be-
|tween the college and the medical ;school. It is there argued that stu- “have succeeded in rendering the A.B. |
dents in the college should be_per- mitted to study in the college the sci-
| ences required by the medical student,
as they now can the sciences prelim- inary to engineering, and that it should be possible for the student to
| complete both his college work and his
medical course in six years. President Lowell apparently wants
|a four-year college course, followed by
ee re
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a medical course which can not count on any special knowledge on the part of the student—it should in this case be five years—and this must be fol- lowed by a year or two in the hos-
pital. Students are on the average
over eighteen years old when they enter Harvard, and the physician would not
begin to practise medicine and to learn |
what can only be taught by practise until he is nearly thirty. To this late
tions both educational and economic.
THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE
615
ence, and the foremost zoologist of Japan.
Any one might safely have predicted that Mitsukuri would succeed. For he came from stock which was both intel- lectual and energetic. For generations
|his family had produced prominent
| scholars, especially physicians, and I
recall that one of his forefathers had
|learned the Dutch language and was
translating works in surgery and an- start in life there are serious objec- |
It may be that the local separation |
of the medical school from the rest of the university which obtains at Har- vard and also elsewhere, as at Colum- bia and the Johns Hopkins, may ulti- mately lead to greater independence on the part of the medical school. In this country we find that medical schools were usually started as inde- pendent institutions which later be- came parts of universities. This was
a great advance, for the medical
schools were largely proprietary insti- tutions whose standards were lower than in the university. But it is per- haps now true that the spirit of schol- arship and research is more advanced in the medical school than in the col- lege. When a medical school is suffi- ciently well endowed and its professors are men devoted to research, it is prob- able that it would be best for it to take charge of the education of stu- dents after they leave the high school, whether their period of instruction is to be four years or ten. The re- sources of the college and the graduate schools could be fully used, but men engaged in medical practise, teaching and investigation should be responsible for the education required by physi- cians and by those preparing to under- take research work in the medical sciences,
KAKICHI MITSUKURI, 1858-1909
In Tokyo on September 16, after a long illness, died Kakichi Mitsukuri, professor of zoology in the Imperial University, dean of the college of sci-
atomy in the days of the early Toku- gawas, when such exotic studies were punishable with death. And it came
| to pass that this family with its tradi-
tion of western learning pushed to the front in the enlightened upheaval of
ithe restoration. And that of its
youngest members Mitsukuri and two of his brothers were among the schol- ars who sought the training of foreign universities. They were better by one than par nobile fratrum, those young Mitsukuri, and if they could have looked from their ship into the waters of the future they would have seen themselves high in the counsels of a new and national university, one of them a dean of a college, another a peer, a minister of education, and a president of a university.
Mitsukuri Kakichi, as he is known in Japan, owed his training largely to the United States. He received his first foreign education in Hartford—he was then but a boy and was in the care of the Misses Goldthwaite, to whom his gratitude was ever almost filial. In
| 1875 he entered the Sheffield Scientific
School, and took his degree of Ph.B. in 1879. The same year he matriculated at Johns Hopkins and studied with Brooks and Newell Martin for four years. In 1881 he became fellow in biology and he took his degree (Ph.D.) in 1883. It may be mentioned that his thesis “On the Gills of Nucula” has not fallen into the limbo of for- gotten dissertations. In his Hopkins days he was an enthusiastic frequenter of the Chesapeake laboratory, and was an intimate of his fellow students, Fessenden Clark, Sedgwick and Wilson.
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616 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY
After this he traveled in Europe, vis- ited universities, English and conti- nental, and thence returned to Japan. There he arrived at an opportune moment: the department of zoology which had been organized by Morse and given a second bent by Whitman, was in a state of upheaval. Japan in general was then beginning to assert her intellectual rights: from the im- ported foreigners it had learned nearly all it felt the need of, and in this instance there seemed no reason why one branch of the educational work should not be carried on entirely by Japanese. Mitsukuri entered into the work with his new training, and with a knowledge of Japanese diplomacy and breeding and obligations which no foreigner, at least in those days, had mastered. So it came about that the department of zoology began a new de- velopment, and in this work Mitsukuri would be the first to testify how much he owed to his trusted associate, Pro- fessor lijima, and his other colleagues.
Mitsukuri devoted much of his life in Japan to his numerous pupils, sacri- ficing to no little degree his research work. He was tireless in his attend- ance at the university, accessible at all times, and with an affectionate friend- liness which no one appreciates more keenly than a Japanese. “I feel I have lost a parent,” writes Dr. M—. And this is the common sentiment among his pupils. His attitude was ideal: he was frank, inspiring, uncom- promising when a question involved accuracy or scientific purpose. “ How different,” he would say, “ is the train- ing of the diplomat and the scientist— the one studies to dress up the truth, the other to expose it naked.” in spite of his long years of foreign train- ing “ because of it,” he would perhaps have said), Mitsukuri was intensely Japanese—patriotiec to his finger-tips, alert to point out the advantages of his country’s ways, but like Okakura, so skilful in his dissection of the fail- ings of his foreign friends that they never minded the pain. None the less,
I have still the feeling that the Jap- anese looked upon him as somewhat too progressive. He admitted foreign- ers among his most intimate friends, he had rooms in his house in foreign style, and his family took its place in social gatherings in the same informal way as in America or Europe. And he could think as a foreigner, and he cer- tainly could write as one, for his Eng- lish never betrayed him. And he had a wide circle of correspondents for whom he was constantly doing, and with the greatest courtesy, troublesome favors.
For zoology in Japan Mitsukuri did these things: He directed the upbuild- ing of the zoological and, to a certain degree (as dean of the science college), the scientific work of the university; he organized zoology in Japan, making his department its focus, not only in technical matters but popular and semi-popular as well; he was the mov- ing spirit in sending zoological ex- peditions throughout Japan from Saga- halin to the Liu Chiu islands—even to Tai Wan; he was conspicuous in founding and developing the Misaki Biological Station; he was potent in building up a fisheries bureau, officered it with his pupils and contributed to its publications; he gave an important stimulus to the pearl industry in Japan and furnished numerous ideas to the culturists who sought to pro- duce natural pearls by artificial means; and last of all he lifted up the position of zoology throughout the country by means of his many-sided teachings and by means of the influ- ence exerted in his behalf by many friends in all stations. In this regard it has often been said he had not a few personal attributes of our own Professor Baird.
His researches cover many branches of zoology. At the time of his death he was completing a monograph of the holothurians of Japan. “ We must do systematic work,” he said in mock apology, “for you know that nearly everything we find here is new, and it
KAKICHI MITSUKURI.
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618 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY
THE Spruce TREE HOovwsSE.
will be decades before we outgrow the
zoological age of Linné.” But his
great work was undoubtedly reptilian |
embryology—indeed his papers on the gastrulation and embryonic membranes of turtles have long become classic. Here, for example, he first. gave the correct interpretation of the primitive streak, discovering the rudiment of the yolk plug and enabled comparisons, on the one hand, with the amphibian, on the other, with avian and mam- malian types. Here, also, he gave the first satisfactory explanation of the relation of the archenterie to the sub- germinal cavity, and the peculiar growth of the sero-amniotiec canal,
which, by the way, one of his pupils
It is in a manner the test. of the big- ness of Mitsukuri that with the keen interest in his purely morphological work he did not fear loss of dignity by contributing to economic subjects. A delightful little paper is his report on Japanese oyster culture, quite after the fashion of his old teacher, Pro- fessor Brooks,
THE SPRUCE TREE HOUSE OF THE MESA VERDE NATIONAL PARK Dr. J. W. FewKes has performed a useful service in exploring and _ re- storing one of the great aboriginal monuments of the country, and the Bureau of Ethnology has now printed a description of the ruin. The Spruce
|'Tree House and the Cliff Palace, the
largest of the ruins of the Mesa Verde Park, were discovered by native cattle herders, and were first adequately de- scribed by Baron Gustav Nordenskiold in 1893. The imposing ruin shown in the illustrations extends 216 feet under
the over-hanging cliff. It contains
_ about 120 rooms and probably housed afterwards demonstrated in the chick. |
some 350 people.
The buildings are divided by an alley into two sections, the northern being the larger and the older. There are in all eight subterranean rooms, which were used for ceremonial pur- poses and are known as kivas. Above these are plazas used for dancing and
other ceremonies, and abcut the plazas
are the living and other rooms, some-
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THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE
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620 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY
times in three tiers. These rooms are
small and usually dark, the only en- |
trance being often a small doorway which served also for window and chimney.
The kivas, one of which is shown in the illustration, are curious structures, probably survivals of pit-houses of an antecedent people. Two walls enclose the circular room, on the inner of which rest six pedestals which support the roof beams consisting of. cedar logs cut with stone axes. The fire-place is in the floor and there is a second de- pression which is a symbolic opening into the under-world. In addition to the kivas there are two other circular rooms and several rectangular rooms, which were probably used for cere- monial purposes. There is also a mor- tuary room, in which severa. skeletons have been found.
The culture was apparently self-cen- tered; the people were farmers, timid, industrious and superstitious; they seem never to have ventured far from home and seldom met strangers; the language they spoke is unknown.
SCIENTIFIC ITEMS WE regret to record the death of Dr. William Torry Harris, for many years U. 8. Commissioner of Education and eminent for his contributions to education and philosophy.
THE Copley medal of the Royal So- ciety has been awarded to Dr. G. W. Hill, the eminent American astron- omer.—Dr. Theodore W. Richards, professor of chemistry at Harvard University, has been elected a corre- sponding member of the Berlin Acad- emy of Sciences.—Professor J. H. Van Amringe, head of the department of mathematics in Columbia University, and dean of the college, will retire
from active service at the end of the present academic year, when he will have completed fifty years of service for the institution and reached his seventy-fifth birthday.
Mr. Joun D. RocKEFevier has given the sum of $1,000,000 to combat the hookworm disease and has selected a commission to administer the fund which includes Dr. William H. Welch, professor of pathology in Johns Hop- kins University; Dr. Simon Flexner, director of Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, and Dr. Ch, Wardell Stiles, chief of the division of zoology, United States Public Health and Ma- rine Hospital Service, discoverer of the prevalence of the disease in America.
By the will of John Stewart Ken- nedy, the banker of New York City, who died on October 31, in his eightieth year, bequests are made for public pur- poses amounting to some $30,000,000. The bequests depend on the size of the estate and the amounts are conserva- tive estimates. They include seven bequests of $2,225,000 each, respect- ively, for Columbia University, the New York Public Library, the Metro- politan Museum of Art, the Presby- terian Hospital in New York City, and to three of the boards of the Presby- terian Church; of $1,500,000 to Robert
| College, Constantinople, and to the
United Charities of New York; $750,- 000 to New York University and the Charity Organization Society of New York for its School of Philanthropy; $100,000 to the University of Glasgow, Yale University, Amherst College, Wil- liams College, Dartmouth College, Bowdoin College, Hamilton College, the Protestant College at Beirut, the Tuskegee Institute and Hampden In- stitute; $50,000 to Lafayette College, Oberlin College, Wellesley College, Barnard - College (Columbia Univer- sity), Teachers College (Columbia University), Elmira College, Northfield Seminary, Berea College, Mt. Hermon Boys’ School and Anatolia College, Turkey; $25 000 to Lake Forest Uni- versity and Center College; $20,000 to Cooper Union. There are also a num- ber of other bequests to hospitals and charities,
INDEX
oO
INDEX
NAMES OF CONTRIBUTORS ARE
Adventure and Science, 414
ALLEMAN, ALBERT, Immigration and the Future American Race, 586
Animal, Living, How Much of it is Alive? A, F, A. Kine, 239
Arraignment of the Theories of Mim- icry and Warning Colors, Apsort H. THAYER, 550
Astronomical Superstitions, Jonn Can- DEE DEAN, 469
Astronomy, The Future of, Epwarp C. PICKERING, 105
Atlantic Forest Region of North Amer- ica, SPENCER TROTTER, 370
Axis, Earth’s, Shifting of the, Sipney D, Town ey, 417
BENTLEY, ance, 458
Biologist’s Standpoint, Life from the, WituiaM E. Rirrer, 174
British Association for the Advance- ment of Science, the Winnipeg Meet- ing of, 207, 411
Brittany, the “Druid Stones” of, J. S. KInGsLey, 124
BuRBANK, LuTHER, Another Mode of Species Forming, 264
Mapison, Mental Inherit-
Cambridge, Darwin at, 206
Camping and Collecting Afoot, A. S. Hitcucock, 274
Canals, Abandoned, of the State of New York, Ety VAN bE WARKER, 297
Capacity of the United States for Pop- ulation, ALBERT PERRY BRiGHAM, 209
CARNEY, FRANK, Geographical Influ- ences in the Development of Ohio, 479
Census, The Last, and its Bearing on Crime, August DRAHMS, 398
Collecting and Camping Afoot, A. Hitcucock, 274
College, and the Student, 99; and the Medical School, 614
Colors, Warning, and Mimicry, Ar- raignment of the Theories of, As- BoTT H. THAYER, 550
Cotton, Harotp SELLERS, Peale’s Mu- seum, 221
Commemoration, bridge, 206
Creation Myths, Medieval, B. K. EmMrr- son, 610
Commemoration
8.
Darwin, at Cam-
PRINTED IN SMALL CAPITALS
| Crime, The Last Census and its Bear-
| |
ing on, AUcusT DRAuMs, 398
Darwin Commemoration at Cambridge, 206
Darwinism, in the Theory of Social Evolution, FRANKLIN H. GurppIN¢s, 75; The World of Life as Visualized and Interpreted by, ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE, 452
Darwin’s Influence upon Philosophy, Joun Dewey, 90
DEAN, JOHN CANDEE, Superstitions, 469
Decimal System of Numbers, KARPINSKI, 490
Dentistry, A Revolution in, RIcHARD CoLE NEwTon, 49
Desert Scenes in Zacatecas, J. bi. KrrK- - woop, 435
Astronomical
Li ©.
| Development, Individual, The Theory
of, FRANK R,. LILLIE, 239
Dewey, JOHN, Darwin’s Influence upon Philosophy, 90
Diseases, Infectious, ance to, and_ its Srmmon FLEXNER. 5
Downey, JuNE E., The Variational Factor in Handwriting, 147
Draums, Avucust, The Last Census and its Bearing on Crime, 398
Druid Stones of Brittany, J. S. KEnes- LEY, 124
Natural Resist- Reinforcement,
Earth’s Axis, Shifting of the, SIDNEY D. TowNLeEy, 417
Effectors, Appropriation of by the Nervous System, G. H. Parker, 65, 137, 253, 338
EMERSON, B. Myths, 610
Emmanuel Movement from a Medical View-point, Homer GaGeE, 358
Environment and Productive Scholar- ship, W. J. HumpnHreys, 587
Eugenics Laboratory of the University of London, 309
Evolution, Social, Darwinism in the Theory of, FRANKLIN H. GIpvINGS, 90; Organic, The Argument for, be-
K., Medieval Creation
fore “The Origin of Species,’ Ar- THUR O. LovEJoy, 499, 537 FLEXNER, Srmon, Natural Resistance
to Infectious Diseases and its Rein- forcement, 5
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622 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY
Forest, Atlantic, of North America, SPENCER TROTTER, 370
FRANKLIN, W. S&., pects of Gyrostatie Action, 20
French Academy and Henri Poincaré, FREDERIC Masson, 267
GAGE, Homer, The Emmanuel Move- ment from a Medical View-point, 358
Galton, Sir Francis, Reminiscences of, 308
GARRISON, FrecpiIne H., Josiah Willard Gibbs and his Relation to Modern Science, 41, 191
Geographic Influences in the Develop- ment of Ohio, FRANK CARNEY. 479
German, vs. Latin, Ratpn H. McKee, 393
Gibbs, Josiah Willard, and his Rela- tion to Modern Science, Frenptna H. GARRISON, 41, 191
GIDDINGS, FRANKLIN H., Darwinism in the Theory of Social Evolution, 75
Gyrostatie Action, Some Practical As- pects of, W. S. FRANKLIN, 20
Halley’s Comet, A Photograph of, 518
Handwriting, The Variational Factor in, JUNE E. Downey, 147
Hircncock, A. S., Collecting and Camping Afoot, 274
Hudson-Fulton Celebration of 1909, GEORGE FREDERICK Kunz, 313
Humpnureys, W. J., Environment and Productive Scholarship, 587
Immigration and the Future American Race, ALBERT ALLEMAN, 586
Individual Development, The Theory of, FRANK R. LILLIE, 239
Infectious Diseases, Natural Resistance to, and its Reinforcement, Stmon FLEXNER, 5
Inheritance, of Vision, 309; MapIson BENTLEY, 458
Intellectual Progress, Zoology in the Service of, WiritntAmM A. Locy, 346
International Language, The Necessity for an, Ivy KELLERMAN, 281
Mental,
JoRDAN, Davin Starr, Jane Lathrop Stanford, 157
KARPINSKI, L. C., The Decimal System of Numbers, 490
KELLERMAN, Ivy. The Necessity for an International Language, 28]
Kelvin, Lord, 515
Kine, A. F. A., What is a Living Ani- mal? How Much of it is Alive? 289
KINGSLEY, J. S., The “ Druid Stones ” of Brittany, 124
KirKwoop, J. E., Zacatecas, 435
Kunz, GEORGE FREDERICK, The Hudson- Fulton Celebration of 1909, 313
Desert Scenes in
Some Practical As- |
Language, An International, The Neces- sity for, Ivy KELLERMAN, 281
Latin vs. German, Ratpn H. McKeer, 393
Lewis, Frepertc T., Preparation for the Study of Medicine, 65
Life, from the Biologist’s Standpoint, WitiiaAM E, Rirrer, 174; The World of, as Visualized and Interpreted by Darwinism, ALFRED RussEL WAL- LACE, 452
LILLIE, FRANK R., The Theory of In- dividual Development, 239
Living Animal, What is a, How Much of it is Ative? A. F. A. Kina, 289
Locy, Witiiam A., Zoology in the Service of Intellectual Progress, 346
London, University of, Eugenics Labo- ratory, 309
Lovesoy, ArtHUR O., The Argument for Organic Evolution, before ‘* The Origin of Species,” 499, 537
LOWELL, PerctvaL, The Planet Venus, 521
McKee, Rarpu H., 393
Masson, FrepéRIc, Henri Poincaré and the French Academy, 267
Mathematies, The Future of, G. A. MILLER, lis
Medical, View-point, The Emmanuel Movement from a, Homer GAGE, 358; School and the College, 614
Medicine, Preparation tor the Study of, FREDERIC T. Lewis, 65
Medieval Creation Myths, B. K. Emrr- son, 610
Mental Inheritance, MApIsOoN BENTLEY, 458
Mesa Verde National Park and the Spruce Tree House, 618
Mitier, G. A., The Future of Mathe- maties, 117
Mimicry and Warning Colors, Arraign- ment of the Theories of, ABnorr H. THAYER, 550
Mitsukuri, Kakichi, 615
Latin vs, German,
Nervous System, The Origin of, and its Appropriation of Effectors, G. H. PARKER, 65, 137, 253, 338
Newcomb, Simon, The Death of, 204
Newton, RicHarp Cok, A Revolution in Dentistry, 49
Nichols, Ernest Fox, 311
Nineteenth Century, Tennyson and the Science of the, 306
NIPHER, FRANCIS E., Simple Lessons in Common Things, 404
Numbers, Decimal System of, L. C. KARPINSEI, 490
Ohio, the Development of, Geographic Influences in, FRANK CARNEY, 479
Organic Evolution, the Argument for, before “The Origin of Species,’ ARTHUR O, LoveJoy, 499, 537
?
INDEX
PaRKER, G. H., The Origin of the Nerv- |
ous System and its Appropriation of Effectors, 481,137, 253, 338 Peale’s Museum; Harotp SELLERS CoL- TON, 22] Philosophy, Darwin’s JoHN Dewey, 90 PICKERING, Epwarp C., The Future of Astronomy, 105 Pittsburgh, University of, ings, 101 Planet Venus, PerctvaAL LoweLL, 521 Poincaré, Henri, and the French Acad- emy, FREDERIC MAsson, 267 Population, Capacity of the United States for, ALBERT PERRY BRIGHAM, 209; Possible, of the United States, 414 Preparation for the Study of Medicine, FREDERIC T, Lewis, 65 Productive Scholarship and Environ- ment, W. J. HUMPHREYS, 587 Progress of Science, 99, 204, 306, 411, 515, 614
Influence upon,
New Build-
Race, Future American, Immigration and, ALBERT ALLEMAN, 586
Resistance, Natural, to Infectious Dis eases, and its Reinforcement, SIMON FLEXNER, 5
Revolution in Dentistry, RicHarp CoLe NEWTON, 49
Ritrer, WriuiaAM E., Life Biologist’s Standpoint, 174
from the
Scholarship, Productive, Environment and, W. J. HUMPHREYS, 587
Science and Adventure, 414
Scientific Items, 104, 208, 519, 620
Shifting of the Earth’s Axis, SIDNEY D. TowNLey, 417
Simple Lessons in
312, 416,
Common Things,
623
Francis E. Nipuer, 404 Sladen, Perey, Memorial Funa, 102
| Social Evolution, Darwinism in the
| Theory of, FRankiIn H. Grpprnes, 75
Species Forming, Another Mode of,
LUTHUR BURBANK, 264
Spruce Tree House of the Mesa Verde National Park, 618
Stanford, Jane Lathrop, Davip Srarr JORDAN, 157
Stones, Druid, of Brittany, J. S. KINGSLEY, 124
Student and the College, $9
Superstitions, Astronomical, JOHN
CANDEE DEAN, 469
Tennyson and the Science of the Nine- teenth Century, 306
THayer, Appott H., Arraignment of the Theories of Mimicry and Warn- ing Colors, 550
TOWNLEY, SIDNEY Earth’s Axis, 417
TROTTER, SPENCER, The Atlantic Forest Region of North America, 370
D., Shifting of the
oO 5S
Variational Factor in JUNE E. Downey, 147
Venus, The Planet, PERCIVAL 521
Vision, Inheritance of, 309
Handwriting,
LOWELL,
WALLACE, ALFRED Russet, The World of Life as Visualized and Interpreted by Darwinism, 452
VAN DE WARKER, Ey, Abandoned Can- als of the State of New York, 297
Winnipeg Meeting of the British Asso- ciation for the Advancement of Sci- ence, 207, 411 ?
Zacatecas, Desert Scenes in, J. E. KIRKWoOOoD, 435
| Zoology, the Service of, to Intellectual
Progress, WILLIAM A. Locy, 346